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YOUNG FRANCE 
AND NEW AMERICA 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

La Yougoslavie (The Southern Slavs) 

— Payot, Paris 

GEAMMAIBE ELEMENTAIEE DE LA LANGUE SEBBE 

— Delagrave, Paris 
(in collaboration with A. Ouyevitch) 

Imajginaiees, poems — Edition romane, Paris 

TRANSLATIONS 
PSYCHOLOGIE ET SOCIOLO-' 

GiE, by Professor J. M 
Baldwin 



Elements de Psycho-So- 
ciOLOGiE, by Professor 
Ellwood 



Giai'd et Bri^e, Paris 



L'Unite Yougoslave, manifeste de la jennesse 
serbe, croate et Slovene reunie — Plon, Paris 

Judith, trag^die, by F. Hebbel 

— Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, Paris 

(in collaboration with G. Gallimard) 



YOUNG FRANCE 
AND NEW AMERICA 



BY 
PIERRE DE LANUX 



NEW YORK 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

1917 

All rights reserved 



Ji5l(> 



Copyright, 1917, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY 



Set up and electrotyped. Published, November, 1917. 



m 30 1917 ^ 









TO 

PROFESSOR WILLIAM GARDNER HALE 

AND TO 

MARICE RUTLEDGE HALE 

FOR MANY REASONS, THIS BOOK 
IS DEDICATED 



FOREWORD 

These are the reflections of a Frenchman who spent 
the year 1917 in America. They deal with the 
present events and those from the near past, but 
their expression is first inspired by the thought of 
the near future, that is to say, the period that will 
begin when this war ends. My purpose was to 
define and to sum up the possibilities which 
Franco- American relations will offer tomorrow, as 
well on intellectual as on concrete grounds. 

This subject would be much too wide for one 
man and for one book, but we shall concentrate on 
the results of co-operation between elements of the 
younger generation of both countries. The present 
book is written for the young men and women of 
America who are interested in the present life of 
France. 

Those who know well my country, having seen 
her and helped her during the present trial, will 
find here some facts which are already familiar to 
them, and I fear that they will resent my pretension 

vii 



viii FOREWORD 

to teach them what they know better than I do my- 
self. Other readers will charge me with excessive 
optimism or with "youthful" severity for the gen- 
eration that preceded mine. It may be that they 
are right; it may be also that they lack the faith and 
vision that is in many of us. 

I wish that, in order to face a state of things 
which is quite new, one could bring a quite new 
attitude of judgment. This is precisely what may 
be expected from Americans, as it is one of their 
best national qualities. We live in a time when the 
fruits of thought are ripening with strange and 
terrible rapidity, and many Utopias of yesterday 
have already passed to the rank of the common- 
place. Let us, therefore, deal with today's Utopia 
with the respect that is owed to the commonplace of 
tomorrow. . . . 

Much has been said and written about Franco- 
American relationships. Since one hundred and 
thirty-nine years, many great and less great minds 
have expressed concordant views on that subject. 
Common interpretation of republican principles, 
love for country and for freedom, joined to that 
idealist and generalizing tendency that made our 
two nations express their Declarations in terms that 
are valuable, not for one country alone, but for the 
whole world, from the very beginning of our con- 



FOREWORD ix 

temporary history — how often did historians and 
orators dwell on that theme, developing it with 
more eloquence than I could bring here! 

But a storm has shaken all the values of the earth. 
Those which will be found intact, after the crisis is 
over, one might well call them eternal. The friend- 
ship of the two Republics is one of them. And the 
values which will be bom from the present over- 
throwing, we have to make clear as soon as possible, 
and confront them with our past, so as to know 
what remains. Among these new values, and in the 
first rank, there is the realization of common stan- 
dards in life, the sense of common task and com- 
mon responsibilities, and, above all, the value of 
mutual knowledge between the youth of France and 
America. For, after all our old reasons for mu- 
tual understanding, there exist now new reasons, 
and indeed, much more powerful ones, which I 
shall try to set forth here. 

Let me first extend my thanks to all those who 
helped me in my task by their generous encourage- 
ments, and especially mention the reviews which 
published some parts of the present work: The 
New Republic, The New France, The Dial, The 
Nation, etc. And let me express my gratefulness 
to the authors of remarkable translations from 
French writers whom I quoted in this book: to Miss 



X FOREWORD 

Virginia Hale, to Miss Elizabeth Eyre, to Mr. 
Joyce Kilmer, to Mr. Deems Taylor, and to Dr. 
Ernest Hart, the last named having translated the 
poems which occur in the body of the section on 
Verhaeren. 

P. L. 

New York, October, 1917. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Foreword vii 

I 

Formation of the Present French Generation 1 

Rapid history of ten years. Awakening to interna- 
tional problems. Hard training to civic and national 
life. Revival in physical life. Foreign influences. Also 
revival of tradition. The spirit of 1914. Who gave the 
best expression of it. The war. The younger elements 
and what they bring. 

II 

About America in 1917 35 

The capital fact of the present evolution. Its prophets. 
America's work during the first part of the war. Con- 
ditions of international leadership. Perils of "Know- 
nothingism." The value of common experience. The 
value of common purpose. War and Democracy. The 
pacifists from the trenches. Our "prussianization." 
Common sense and our aims. 

Ill 

Promises of Concrete Co-operation .... 63 

New conditions of work in Europe, nearer to the 
American conditions, because of the scarcity of men and 
the necessity of rapid reconstruction. American methods 
to be brought. The new spirit of economic activity in 
France. A writer on French labour. An instance of 
common task: co-operation in the countries which are 
economically backward, but jealous of national independ- 
ence, and will welcome the Franco-American enterprises. 



CONTENTS 

IV PAGE 

Literary Interchange 91 

Forms of influence. Is external influence to be wel 
come? American writers who are known in France 
About French criticism. Translations of literature 
Educational exchanges. The philosophers. The literary 
treasury of contemporary France. Our masters and el 
ders. Recent tendencies. Emile Verhaeren's interna 
tional value. The new poets of France: More children 
of Walt Whitman. Schools, groups and critics. The 
Reviews. War poems. And then? 

Music in France. 

V 
Conclusions 142 

History of mutual knowledge. False ideas about each 
other. Principle of our exchanges. France's experience 
and America's methods. Common task in the organiza- 
tion of peace. The two nations who did most work un- 
selfishly for the world. Psychology of our understanding. 
Individual comradeship as a basis for our relations. Re- 
sponsibilities. 

Index of Proper Names Cited 151 



YOUNG FRANCE 
AND NEW AMERICA 



YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW 
AMERICA 



I 



FORMATION OF THE PRESENT FRENCH 
GENERATION 

Rapid history of ten years. Awakening to international 
problems. Hard training to civifc and national life. Revival 
in physical life. Foreign influences. Also revival of tradition. 
The spirit of 1914. Who gave the best expression of it. The 
war. The younger elements and what they bring. 

"L'angoisse est necessaire aux races qui sont fortes 
Et 'pov/r grandir encore, il leur faut le danger" 

— Emile Verhaeren, 

This stuay, or rather this rapid retrospective 
glance, will not be given from the standpoint of the 
historian. It will be just material for History to 
come, and personal testimony rather than impartial 
definitions. Many records like this will have to 
be added in order to form even a sketch of the 
recent past that will not be too incomplete. I shall 
simply tell my national experience to my comrades 
from the other side. 



2 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

It was a wonderful advantage to me to live in 
contact with the best among the younger men and 
women. They were writers, teachers, engineers or 
artists, belonging to many classes and opinions; 
they were also the labourers and the country peo- 
ple with whom I lived when serving as a soldier. 
To all of them I am indebted for what I am going 
to tell about this present generation. So, if there 
is beauty in the spectacle which they give, and 
which I shall here describe, tliey deserve all ad- 
miration for it. 

Our parents gave us, as usually happens, some 
splendid examples to follow, and, also, some ven- 
erable standards to discard. As usually happens, 
we discovered the latter before we acknowledged 
the good to be kept. Or rather, the good was laid 
in us without our being aware of it, and is probably 
greater than our pride yet knows. 

They were the children of 1870. They had been 
brought up in France's darkest days, when defeat, 
mutilation and isolation followed the factitious 
prosperity of our Second Empire. At that time 
France was absolutely alone; so they took the habit, 
for twenty years, of reasoning strictly on our forces, 
our fate, practically ignoring the rest of the world. 

Our generation, from our younger years on, was 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 3 

used to go back for its models to other times than 
the period which extends from 1870 to 1890. We 
differed in our models, but we agreed to dislike 
that period. It meant to us bad taste, prejudices, 
moral fears, limited ideas, ugly fashions, Victori- 
anism without even prestige, people being hypno- 
tized by their recent defeat and spending their 
forces in internal disputes which did not offer the 
slightest interest to us. We were surprised by the 
obstinate, obtrusive, negative hostilities of some na- 
tionalists against the foreigners, of free thinkers 
against the priests, of all creeds against each other. 
We resented severely that they had not under- 
stood their great XlXth century (of course it was 
easier to us), and that they could not digest it. 
Liberty, Equality and Fraternity were written 
everywhere, even on prison doors, but we were irri- 
tated not to find them in the acts of living persons. 
Big things were done by men of exception, against 
the others and without their help. I believe that 
this was a period of transition and hesitation — not 
of affirmation. A period when old and new stan- 
dards were fighting each other unfruitfully, because 
men did not perceive the beauty and full meaning of 
that conflict itself, and were not used to their own 
mental emancipation. They spent their force for 
small results when immense things were at stake, 



4 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

and they followed small men in a time when great 
geniuses were living. What they took seriously 
seemed to us to be obsolete; what we worshipped 
made them smile. We envied a little their virtues, 
and not at all their vices. And we were totally 
disgusted by the lack of moral independence of 
their lives. They said "realism" when they meant 
"ugliness," and that single feature would be 
enough to separate them from us. They lied to 
themselves in their tastes, in their passions, in their 
words. They were deeply sunk in lie. 

I seem to speak resentfully, but I cannot forget 
the old generals who dressed our young men in red 
trousers to send them to a modem war. The ruling 
class of 1870-1900 was more or less like these 
brave chiefs. We felt that such a world was wait- 
ing for new men. Now, we know that we were 
right. But, at the same time, we can explain why 
our elders were such; and we realize, too, that the 
new men are not us, but the younger ones — who 
know much that we ignore. 

This is how things appeared when we were about 
18. All national danger seemed remote and ab- 
stract. There had been a bitter injustice com- 
mitted against us in 1870, when Germany had torn 
Alsace-Lorraine away from us, and we kept the hope 
that this would be readjusted some time. But few 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 5 

expected that readjustment from a war, since war 
had proved to mean injustice. So we believed that 
other people expected nothing from war. And we 
came to lose the belief in the possibility of war itself. 
After the generation which had suffered from the 
ordeal of '71, people had grown to be compara- 
tively indifferent to the various foreign problems 
and conflicts which did not concern France immedi- 
ately, because they believed that France could not 
be involved against her will in an armed conflict. 
And around us were flourishing in full prosperity 
the ideas of the future, great social schemes, new 
artistic impulses, preceding the time when the uni- 
verse would be ready to receive them, preceding 
the actual conditions, and Utopian only because of 
that. We were enthusiastic about them, still some- 
thing was warning us that instead of solving the old 
problems of race, nationality, domination, they 
simply neglected them, or rather solved them ab- 
stractly, for the satisfaction of a few intelligences. 
In fact, the problems remained open. Endeavours 
to prevent future wars met with scepticism, or sank 
into Utopian schemes. We had a feeling that a 
greater light, all possible light, indeed, ought to 
have been brought on the direct cause and risks of 
European conflicts, which were obscure to many.^ 

1 "Thus the men in Europe who can really claim to have 



6 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

France was preparing to show the way, once more, 
and we were passionately learning our business of 
world-pioneers. We were in great, passionate, 
earnest hesitations. We admired, in that time, An- 
atole France and we admired Barres. I name these 
two personifications of reformist and nationalistic 
spirit, although, of course, for other young men the 
same tendencies took other names. Barres told us 
of the Earth and of the Dead, with arguments which 
appealed to our deepest, truest conservative in- 
stincts. And Anatole France, smiling, said: 
"What hath been written by the dead shall be can- 
celled by the living; otherwise the will of those who 
are no more would impose itself upon those who are 
still, and the dead would be the living, and the living 
would be the dead." — And we knew that both were 
true. 

This antagonism could be felt in the long quarrel 
about the programs of teaching. The question of 

worked for peace are not those who wanted to disarm their 
own country, to keep it neutral under all circumstances. . . . 
The true peacemakers were those who grasped the real strug- 
gle between the Entente and the Alliance, and proposed con- 
crete improvements in the diplomacy about Africa, Asia Minor, 
and the Far East. The men who had better solutions of the 
Moroccan, Congo, and Balkan problems were the ones who 
can claim now to have done their share of thinking for civiliza- 
tion. . . . Those who saw the source of the friction and tried 
to remedy it were the real internationalists." (Walter Lipp- 
mann — The Stakes of Diplomacy.) 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 7 

the programs in the Universities, which was more 
of a political dispute for the men who fixed them, 
was, for us, a question of choosing the knowledge 
that would help us to the kind of life we wanted to 
live. And what was that life? 

This was being decided, little by little, as the 
result of many influences. (Certainly more varied 
influences than any other generation had received 
before.) They came through new channels. We 
practised more physical life than our fathers, and 
that influenced our ways- of living. (I shall dwell 
again on this aspect of our formation.) We trav- 
elled more. If I take my six best friends as exam- 
ples, I find that one has been in Germany and 
Tunisia, another in Russia and in Greece; the third 
through Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil; the fourth 
in California and Russia ; the fifth in England, Italy, 
Russia and North America; the sixth in Algeria, 
Spain and Asia Minor; and I had, myself, at 27, 
visited thirteen nations in Europe. Three other 
friends of mine, being about 25, have founded a 
vast and prosperous French enterprise in British 
Columbia, after having been first around the world. 

This was together the consequence and cause of 
our learning foreign languages much more than it 
had been done before. The time we spent in that 



8 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

work, however imperfect the knowledge that we 
might reach, is a time we never regret. It opened 
not only more possibilities for travelling, for easier 
business, direct meeting of the people, but it gave us 
the key to whole literatures, which, in their turn, 
played a decisive part in our intellectual formation. 
At least foreign language brought understanding of 
the foreign spirit, a sense of what is relative and 
what absolute in expression, and new reasons to love 
our own language. 

Some foreign works impressed us greatly. Dos- 
toievsky after Tolstoi, Kipling after Dickens, Whit- 
man after E. A. Poe, meant a great deal, not only to 
writers, but to readers of any class or purpose. 
(How many young men did I find in the French Am- 
bulance Service, during this war, in Belgium or in 
Macedonia, who were reading Walt Whitman's 
"Wound Dresser," from the "Drum Taps"!) 

All this was preparing the notion of universal con- 
cern, which is so strong now in all of us. We got 
trained to think beyond the frontiers. Wliat I 
called the disciples of Anatole France, looked there 
mostly for foreign culture. The disciples of 
Barre's looked there for danger. Elder people, 
apart from few exceptions, spoke of danger and of 
culture, but did not look there at all. They were 
negative; they were just critical; they always knew 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 9 

the reasons against doing things; they were im- 
mensely far from America, whom they ignored and 
feared. They might have prevented this war, 
which from any standpoint is a failure, for all poli- 
cies which led to it. They called it, afterwards, in- 
evitable. But it was not. And as our generation 
is dying in it, it has a certain right to state how 
things did happen. 

It was in 1905 that our hard training to civic and 
national life began, with our awakening to danger, 
and to the great fact that, now, everybody is con- 
cerned with everything that happens in the world. 
I insist upon this, because this explains all : our atti- 
tude before the war, our stand in the war, and our 
will after the war. 

In 1904-5, came the Russo-Japanese conflict. 
Most of us did not feel that we were very strongly 
affected by it. Still we were. As soon as our 
Russian ally had proved to be weaker, Germany 
started her aggressive policy in the Moroccan ques- 
tion. That year Charles Peguy published his 
"cahier," Notre Patrie, about that precise week, that 
very day when we realized the presence of danger: 
"As every one, I had come back to Paris at 9 in the 
morning; as every one, that is to say, as about eight 
or nine hundred persons, I knew at half past eleven 



10 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

that a new period had just begun in the history of my 
own life, in the history of this country, and certainly 
in the history of the world." . . . "Every one, at 
the same time, knew that the menace of a German in- 
vasion was present, that it was there, that it was 
really imminent." 

"It was not a news like ordinary news — it went 
from one man to another like a knowledge from 
anterior life, a recognition of anterior certitude. 
Indeed, each of us did find in himself the recog- 
nition total, immediate, ready, immobile — of this 
menace which was present. . . . Each man recog- 
nized in himself, as if it were familiar and well- 
known, this deep voice, this voice from inside, this 
voice of long-buried memory." 

Later, Germany provoked brutal incidents in 
Alsace, which gave opportunity to notice that the 
Reichstag, representing the German people, had no 
authority whatever to disapprove a government 
which had the support of the Emperor. In 1908 
came the annexation of Bosnia by Austria, against 
the will of the Serbian population, and this was the 
direct source of the Balkan trouble and of the 
European war. Now is it not the very image of our 
subject and a symbol of our times: that in order to 
write, in America, about France, I am obliged to 
mention the annexation of Bosnia and to insist upon 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 11 

it? I was a soldier at that time, and I had been in 
Bosnia before. I remember my comrades asking 
me to explain what was the connection between that 
Turkish province and their possible going to battle 
against the Prussians? Many of them did not be- 
lieve that such a connection existed. 

In 1911 Germany sent a warship to the Moroccan 
coast. I remember the feeling we had, of air being 
made irrespirable by that nation. We had to come, 
little by little, in spite of ourselves, to adopt the feel- 
ings and opinions of our fathers towards the Prus- 
sians. We discovered our fathers to be right, by 
ourselves. We did not inherit the idea of revenge, 
as the Germans always pretended. We thought it, 
for a time, to be the remotest possible illusion. (In 
1899, at the time of the Boer war and after the 
Fashoda incidents, England was a hundred times 
more unpopular than Germany in France, among the 
young.) Germany having chosen the "big stick" 
policy, we rediscovered, one by one, the elements of 
old hostilities. The man from the people who had 
been anti-militaristic for a time and who loved 
his work and peace, got more and more impatient, 
and realized that in Europe a group of powers was 
acting systematically against us when nothing was to 
fear from us. For the people of France were still 
ready to do many new foolish things, but could 



12 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

never, never have been driven into an aggressive 
war. We felt this drawback to the maintenance of 
peace. But we were decided, and our friends and 
allies with us, to maintain peace in spite of the 
drawback. 

In 1912 the Balkan war broke out. Four small 
nations, in order to make their brothers free from 
Turkish yoke, mobilized. The European govern- 
ments refused to believe in a possible war, and when 
it broke out they believed in the victory of the Turks. 
When the Turks were defeated these governments 
did not know how to prevent discord from arising 
among the victors, and when this brought a second 
war, in 1913, they could see that Austria and Ger- 
many were responsible for it, and a splendid na- 
tional insurrection ended pitifully in a slaughter 
of allies because the Central Powers wanted the 
weakening of Serbia and the rupture of the Balkan 
league. 

Even during these Balkan wars, many said in 
France, "Let those people fight if they want to. We 
have nothing to do with Balkanic aspirations.''' 
Still, Serbian aspirations to independence meant the 
end of the German ambition in "Mittel-Europa." 
Some of us had a notion of that. So, at the news of 
mobilization, in October, 1912, I had gone to 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 13 

Serbia, and managed to see this crisis through. I 
saw after a few weeks, as plainly as any man could 
have done in my place, that the true enemy of Bal- 
kanic freedom and peace was not only Turkey, but 
Austria, and that the victories over the Turks were 
already victories over the Germans; and that the 
seed of terrible European troubles was in the op- 
pression of the Southern Slavs by the Austrians. 
One had but to be there and talk with the people, to 
bring back invaluable observations. When I did 
so, competent people did not refuse to believe me, 
but they considered that the matter was not impor- 
tant enough to pay much attention to it. 

My deep conviction is that the peril could have 
been checked in its beginning, in 1913, if we all had 
had sufficient information and a strong feeling that 
we were all threatened by it. That is why I believe 
that the ignorance and indifference of the world is 
the greatest, worst enemy of mankind and of peace. 
And, above all, this war has to wipe out interna- 
tional "know-nothingism." 

On the 28th of June, 1914, the Austrian Crown 
prince was killed by a Bosnian fanatic. 

On the 3rd of August, 1914, as a consequence, 
Germany declared war upon France. 

But those ten years had prepared us for "I'Union 



14 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

Sacree." It was a part of our equipment for mo- 
bilization. And the Kaiser did not know it. . . . 

I come now to a most difficult part of my task, 
which is to give the true portrait of the young man of 
France at the eve of the war — his actions in the war 
have been but a consequence of those morals of his, 
that were moulded before. We have seen what had 
influenced him. What was the result of it all? 
Which ethics were ours in 1914? 

I have a very high idea of them — of course, since 
they were mine, but I begin to believe that there is 
something even finer, and it is the ethics of the 
young men who are now twenty and who had their 
moral formation during the war. 

We had, as has been said, to combine and recon- 
cile the conservative impulses, the impulses for 
reformation, in a peculiar national situation, and 
to add to this the result of our own moral experi- 
ences, which were rather rich and bold. (Some- 
times innovation had led to an unexpected form of 
tradition. Sport was a true returning to old 
French sixteenth century habits.) 

We gave to personal freedom and responsibility, 
not to mention sincerity to oneself, an importance 
which brought us nearer to American standards than 
you believe. We felt immense, unlimited admira- 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 15 

tion and reverence for our masters, who were those 
exceptions among our elders. They were the intel- 
ligent and the strong, and the loving, wherever we 
could find them. 

I do not speak now of literary mastership ; but of 
a vital one. The thinkers whom we followed had 
come to an ethical, often to a political and re- 
ligious attitude, which was made of affirmation. 
Even those who were free from political entangle- 
ments, were deeply and constantly affected by the 
national life. (How far from the misanthropic, 
nonchalant artists of 1890!) None were indiffer- 
ent to collective problems. The most skeptical, 
apparently, were not the least passionate. All had 
an interpretation of moral life, to propose. And 
among them we chose, and about them we earnestly 
discussed within ourselves and with each other. 

One man we were reading with more and more 
attention, among those elders of exception. Charles 
Peguy had been for 16 years the editor of Les 
Cahiers de la Quinzaine, a periodical which pub- 
lished literary, political, documentary works, as 
separate books. (There appeared for the first time 
the works of Romain Rolland, including the famous 
Beethoven, and the long serial of Jean Christophe.) 

Peguy belonged to old French soil. His parents 
were peasants. He had the strong culture from the 



16 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

Ecole Normale, but his faithfulness to the earth of 
his ancestors was like France's herself. He had 
clear, penetrating views, was hard to his opponents, 
and hard to his friends. He described once, with 
implacable accurateness, the contradictory aspects 
of Jaures, the great socialist leader, his power and 
also his weakness. He was absolutely honest, to his 
party, to his readers, to himself. When we read his 
books we learnt what civic morals meant. They 
are usually the most corrupt (because treason and 
capitulation are there of little consequence) and 
they ought to be the purest (because they are simple, 
without obscure nuances, and honesty almost suf- 
fices.) But Peguy brought something more than 
honesty. He revealed to us a mystical side of pol- 
itics. 

"We turn then to the young people ... we can 
only say to them: Take care. You look upon us 
as back numbers. This is good, — but be careful. 
When you speak lightly, when you treat the Repub- 
lic lightly, so lightly, you run the risk not only of 
being unjust (which is, perhaps, nothing in your 
system, at least, so you say, but which in our system 
is serious, and, according to our ideas, a good deal) . 
You risk more, in your system even, in your ideas ; 
you risk being stupid. . . . You forget, you ignore 
that there has been a republican mysticism (that 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 17 

which we call republican mystics) ; and to forget it, 
and to ignore it, does not necessarily mean that it has 
not existed. Men have died for liberty as men have 
died for faith. These elections of today appear to 
you a grotesque formality, universally hypocritical, 
corrupt through and through ; and you have the right 
to say so. But men have lived, men without num- 
ber, heroes, martyrs, and I will say saints, and when 
I say "saints," I know, perhaps, what I am talking 
about ... an entire people have lived so that the 
lowest idiot of today should have the right to accom- 
plish this corrupt formality. This was a terrible, a 
laborious and formidable childbirth. Nor had this 
always reached the limit of grotesqueness. The 
peoples around us, nations, entire races, are in 
travail with the same painful childbearing; are 
working and struggling to obtain this ludicrous 
formality . . . 

"These elections are ludicrous. But the heroism 
and the sanctity with which, by means of which, are 
obtained these ludicrous results, temporarily ludi- 
crous, contain all that is most fine and most sacred 
in the world. 

"Everything begins in mystics and ends in pol- 
itics. . . . The essential is that in each order of 
things, in each system, the mystic should not be de- 
voured by the politic to which it has given birth." 



18 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

I thought of Peguy when I read this simple 
answer in Witter Bynner's New World: "Beauty in 
politics? — If you put it there." . . . Peguy reacted 
against our tendency to desert politics. He ac- 
cepted all the duties of the citizen. 

Charles Peguy, who went as a lieutenant of re- 
serve with his section of infantiy, was killed at the 
battle of the Mame, in September, 1914. 

The following lines are to be found in his last 
Cahier, which was entitled "Sur la Philosophic de 
M. Bergson," and was among the best works he ever 
gave. One may realize the loss we endured by his 
death. 

"A great philosophy is not an irreproachable 
philosophy. It is a fearless philosophy. 

"A great philosophy is not a dictation. The 
greatest is not that which is faultless. 

"A great philosophy is not the one against which 
there is nothing to say. It is tlie one which has 
said something. 

"And, moreover, it is the one which had some- 
thing to say, in spite of being unable to say it. 

"It is not the one which has no errors. It is not 
the one which has no gaps. It is the one which has 
abundancies. 

"It is not a question of confusing. It is in the 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 19 

schools that it is a question of confusing. It is not 
even a question of convincing. 

"To confuse the adversary in a matter of philoso- 
phy . . . what bad breeding! 

"The true philosopher knows that he is not stand- 
ing opposing his adversary, but beside his adver- 
sary and others, facing a reality always greater 
and more mysterious. 

"And this even the true physician knows. That 
he is not standing opposing his rival physician, but 
beside him, facing a nature always more profound 
and more mysterious. 

"To listen to a philosophical debate, or to partici- 
pate therein, with the idea that one is going to con- 
vince or subjugate his adversary, or that one is going 
to see one of the two adversaries confound the other, 
is to show that one does not know what one is talking 
about, to acknowledge to great incapacity, vulgarity 
and barbarism. It is evidence of a great lack of 
culture. It is to show that one does not belong to 
this country." 

His conclusion to the discussions about Berg- 
sonism was this: 

"It is a prejudice, but it is an absolutely un- 
eradicable prejudice that demands that an inflexible 
reason should be more a reason than a flexible one. 



20 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

... It is the same prejudice that demands that an 
inflexible scientific method should be more a 
method, and more scientific, tlian a flexible scien- 
tific method. 

"It is evident, on the contrary, that it is the elastic 
and flexible methods, flexible logic, and flexible 
morals that are the most severe, as they adhere the 
most closely to their object. 

"An inflexible logic may permit errors to escape 
from its recesses. . . . An inflexible moral may 
permit crimes to escape from its recesses, while, on 
the contrary, a flexible moral will hold, denounce 
and pursue the sinuosities of those things which 
seek to escape. Inflexibility is essentially false; 
flexibility is true. 

"It is flexible morals which exact a heart to keep 
perpetually ready and pure, and which exercise the 
most implacable and hard restraints. The only 
ones which are never absent, which do not pardon. 
It is elastic and flexible morals, flexible methods, 
flexible logic, that exercise the most implacable ob- 
ligations. It is for this reason that the most honest 
man is not he who enters into apparent rules. It is 
he who remains in his place, who works, who suff"ers 
and who says nothing." 

These are the last lines of his that were published. 
But Peguy was still an elder to us. I shall quote 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 21 

now another writer, who really embodied, for the 
few years of his life, our best feelings, beliefs, 
enthusiasms. He was the living soul of us all. 
Henri Franck died at 23, before the war, leaving 
an unfinished poem: La Danse devant VArche, and 
various essays on philosophy and literature. 

Here are the verses where he speaks of his friends 
and of our group : ^ 

"French boys, fine of face, raised by your mothers. 

Who from babyhood had slow and serious growth 

In your large houses enclosed in leafy gardens. 

Boys religious as I was, from childhood taught 

To assist the priest and help in conducting the mass ; 

Older, you left intelligent mother and wise father 

And came to complete in Paris the growth of your spirit. 

You have sense and pleasing manners, politeness and 

warmth ; 
Latin and geometry you knew, and combining 
Things respected from childhood and those learned in 

college. 
Religious boys, much troubled by your studies, 
At twenty years strangely you try to reconcile 
Old beliefs with your new uncertainty." 

And this expresses the understanding among the 
young men who find themselves before the new task 
of their lives: 

"0 the joy of feeling ourselves in heart among our con- 
temporaries, 
And of building up our spirits through each other! 

1 Translation by Miss V. Hale. 



22 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

"Because in the same year we were all conceived 
There vibrates a secret understanding among us, 
A thing that is strong to bind our youthful brows 
As the yoke binds the oxen together to their teams. 
Like them we press on with united effort, 
Like them bear on the earth an equal weight. 

• ••••... 

"The air in which our laugh rings and our voices sound 
Is of the same age. It was born with us; 
Because we had our growth at the same time, together, 
Each of us understands, and each expresses, all the 

others ; 
Each of us easily may know from the beginning 
What this clear-headed old man may not know. 

• ••••••• 

"We have been watching the new life grow within us, 

And now it is ripe, eager to spend itself. 

It is we, now, who shall take the risk, 

We, who shall hurl the discus. 

And our violin shall lead the dance. 

We are seeking a place where to build our work. 

"The generation which we form together 
Is winged and massive as a swarm of bees — 
What branch will hold its humming fruit. 
And what will be the flavour of our honey?" 

Henri Franck had a clear and intense belief in 
the genius of France. He said of the French lan- 
guage: 

"It is like the mobile and expressive face, 
The obedient army under its intelligent chief. 
And the royal road where the spirit entire 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 23 

May march forward at ease. 

Like the fiery sword the arch-angel wielded, 

The sword of reason, it reveals and separates. 

Defines and creates limits, points out and circumscribes. 

"It has the ring of laughter, it is the voice of justice, 

The sound of clearness and of certitude, 

The pure expression of the inner self. 

Over the orator it throws a decent dress. 

And gives the hero's voice resounding speech." 

And glorifying the country herself and then the 
Republic: 

"I greet you, sentinel on the bridge of Europe, 

Live bird in your vines, lark in your field. 

Cock singing at dawn of the centuries on your farm; 

And as a peasant entering the hall 

Out of respect for the masters of the house 

And that he may not soil the finely waxed floor 

Carefully removes his boots and holds them in his hand, 

So in your honour, France, I put aside 

The heavy perturbation of my spirit; 

The gaze with which I look upon you shall be clear. 

My eyes shall look with love, cherished country ! 

"0 ancient wisdom built up century after century; 
courage of the world, heart of the West, 
Nation inventive, intelligent, O Living One — 
Republic, I hail you by your glorious name. 

"As a young woman leaning on the balcony of the family 

mansion 
The house adorned with antique portraits and coats of 

arms, and statues along the walks. 



24 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

Will not look at the walls of the house 

Nor its arms woven in beautiful tapestries, 

Nor the ancient escutcheons painted upon its wood, 

But with a long look courageous and eager 

Follows the great ships cleaving the water toward new 

lands 
And the young emigrant with exalted look on his face: 
Youth, with elbow braced upon the history of ages 
You turn your eyes toward the free horizon. 

"And you are the first to build and the first to destroy; 
That in your generous heart you may feel life always 

warm. 
Each century you turn your age-cold knowledge to new 

purpose, 
You put to untried uses your ancient wealth." 

If I quote such long passages it is because I never 
could find a better and more accurate expression of 
our spirit than this lyrical one. In a great epoch, 
the poets are the best speakers of a nation. 

Henri Franck was passionately devoted to philo- 
sophical study and teaching. But his essential dis- 
position to abstract thought did not prevent him 
from hearing 

"Along the open frontier — the stirring 

Of ponderous legions of Teutons hungry for prey." 

And in one of his philosophical chronicles in the 
review La* Phalange, he wrote these prophetical sen- 
tences, as he returned from a trip to Alsace, where 
he met the men, the Alsatians: 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 25 

"Ah, when, after a week, I went up again from 
Barr and Obernai to Sainte-Odile, under my steps 
questions arose with the leaves; as I walked with 
care not to hurt the earth, I felt that I was treading 
on a great and sorrowful problem. We must go, 
all of us, every year, several times a year, armed 
with letters of introduction, to visit Alsace and talk 
with the Alsatians. You will not teach them much, 
but you will learn a great deal from them — Barres 
is right. 

"They will give you a conclusive lesson in energy 
and manly pride. Though Charles Andler, in a 
magnificent lecture, did indeed warn us that there is 
no German culture, I had not grasped the whole 
meaning of the statement. Nov*^, thanks to the 
Alsatians, I am in a position to confirm it and to ex- 
plain it to you. . . . 

"The question is a pressing one. Germany be- 
comes each day more odious. Europe no longer 
breathes freely. It was Germany that contrived 
the vile plot which made Young Turkey its victim. 
It is sad to think that today Lord Byron would go to 
the rescue of the Turks, but where is Lord Byron? 
And we — what are we doing? We must really ap- 
preciate that the time for delicate intellectual hesita- 
tions has passed. In every corner of the world the 
future meets one obstacle: Germany. . . . The 



26 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

magnificent struggle between the middle class 
which has not yet lost its moral strength, and those 
of the workers who are seeking to find and to pre- 
pare themselves, is dominated and warped by Ger- 
man effort. Is this heavy backward force much 
longer to bar our way? Will it be successful in 
throwing itself across the path of the creative evo- 
lution of French freedom?" 

That was written in 1910. 

It may easily be seen that the want of young men 
was for an employment of their mystical faculties, 
an answer to their mystical exigencies. It has been 
called a "renaissance of idealism," which is not 
quite true. The sign of youth in nations as well as 
in individuals is the want to give themselves widely 
to high and limitless aims. These young men did 
not exactly go back to a former spiritual ideal. 
But first they worshipped what they knew to be the 
highest objects of love; and then they wanted to call 
"Divine" what they loved. Mystics do not mean 
orthodoxy, for there are mystics resulting from any 
high form of belief, and they do not exclude each 
other. A mistake that was made some time ago 
was to expect from Science, mystics to be created 
that would replace all others. This could no more 
be conceived by a generation which had assimilated 
pragmatism. Now Peguy proposed a form of 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 27 

mystics, and Paul Claudel another, and Whitman 
another. We listened to them all. And it can be 
said indeed that there was no new work of art 
which was not consciously backed by mystics. 

Yes, it was a rich epoch, a clean, strong, passion- 
ate one. It was free from prejudice for or against 
science. But everything was looked at for what it 
was, and only those false witnesses were hated who 
gave to France a visage which had never been hers, 
and were responsible for the distorted image which 
the world had of her. ( Some of them are still alive 
or enthroned in the Academic.) A sense of respon- 
sibility developed which was not imposed as a heavy 
burden, but accepted as a joyful dignity. Every 
moment of personal, cultural or national life 
obliged a choice, and it was indifference which was 
losing ground. Professor James Mark Baldwin, 
who followed closely that "renaissance" and prob- 
ably interpreted an aspect of it in his theory of 
"Pancalism," wrote in 1913:^ 

"Indeed, the signs multiply of a new departure 
in France, a departure amounting to a renascence 
of the spiritual life. It shows itself in a new 
sobriety and firmness in foreign policy, a new de- 
mand for personal temperance and restraint, a new 

^French and American Ideals (Manchester). 



28 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

enthusiasm for moral achievement. In this the true 
elan of the French character is again revealed. A 
new stage of the French ideal is in process of 
formation. . . . Americans join with all the world 
in acclaiming this renewal of the national life of 
France in a moral purpose so resolute, so informed 
with knowledge, so sure of itself." 

When the war broke out, the first spontaneous 
manifestation which resulted from it was I'Union 
Sacree. It was an immediate response to a ques- 
tion that had to be instantly solved. All solved it 
in the same sense, because a clear feeling of rela- 
tive importance of things was instantly imposed 
upon us. First of all, France had to be saved. 
And in this struggle, two principles were face to 
face. On one side, the system, more immediately 
prosperous, of stiff unification and mechanical co- 
operation was imposed — an order complete but 
artificial. On the other side, unification coming 
by itself, from within, by a natural, normal process 
of life as a result of the free will of men freely 
associated, an order which was more rich and flexi- 
ble. The battle of the Marne decided between 
those two orders, and was for the civilized world 
of today what Salamis had been for the Greek 
world. 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 29 

The French were morally prepared for the worst, 
and the first retreat did not surprise them. If 
Paris had had to be besieged or even abandoned, 
the army's morale would have stood the shock. But 
that extreme trial was spared us. And then began 
a great experience of mutual knowledge for the 
French. Social classes, political parties, were 
mixed in the trench, and as each one was giving 
an equal share of blood, none had a right to claim 
more patriotic authority than the others. These 
classes and parties learned to meet on the basis of 
equality before death, which is a rather solid basis 
on which to appreciate each other. They certainly 
are decided to oppose each other after the war, 
for every one finds in the great and complex events 
reasons to confirm his faith and standards. But 
they will fight each other more intelligently, hav- 
ing more respect for what they oppose. No valu- 
able evolution of thought could be obtained by 
sanguinary process, except on the subject of war 
itself and the realization of its horrors. But in 
the interior of each party an evolution occurred 
towards more consciousness and dignity. 

As for a better knowledge of foreign minds, what 
invaluable experience was the presence on our soil 
of men from most allied countries: Belgians, 
Serbians, Americans, Englishmen, Russians, Portu- 



30 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

guese, Italians ! What an opportunity given to our 
young men to put into practice their abstract inter- 
est and curiosity for other countries, and to prepare 
countless forms of co-operation for the work after 
the war! 

Many of them, though, will work no more. 
Thousands will play no more a part in the life of 
the country they loved — and no part in life at all. 
My friends Alain-Fournier, Baguenier-Desormeaux, 
Jean Reutlinger, Armand de Montousse — and my 
countless brothers whose names I do not know — 
you were the best among us and now you leave a 
heavy task for us to perform. We shall miss you 
not with the heart only; we shall miss your energies 
and advice. At least we must try to imagine what 
you would require from us, and then do it. 

Not death only did strike the martyred country, 
but also sufferings of all kinds. The endless trains 
of wounded, I have them well in mind. Thousands 
of bleeding bodies I bent over: 

"The crushed head . . . 

The neck of the cavalryman with the bullet through and 
through, I examine, 

. . . The perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet- 
wound, 

. . . The one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so 
sickening, so offensive. . . ." ^ 

1 Whitman. 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 31 

And above all, this has been the infinite 
martyrdom of women. Women of our time have 
been through trials which made them the true vic- 
tims of this war. Think of the little probability of 
the infantryman coming back, after three years of 
renewed, perpetual risk. Women faced this with 
limitless heroism. They had shared the moral 
preparation of the young men ; they, too, had known 
those enlightening and exalting discoveries which 
were ours, and often they approached more closely 
than we, to our own young standards of life. In- 
deed they contributed in fixing those standards, and 
we knew that we were right when they approved of 
what we did. In the war they played a part equal 
to that of the men, as nurses, workers in ammuni- 
tion factories, and in learning hundreds of new oc- 
cupations. And they brought up alone, true to our 
ideals magnified by the greatest of sacrifices, the 
children of the fighting, and the children of the 
dead. 

Useless, criminal business was this war. I can't 
compare it better than to a huge railway catastrophe, 
due to mischief: an engineer had run mad and be- 
lieved that all trains had to yield the track to him. 
Now trains are burning. The more help, the sooner 
it will be over. It is no more a question of idly 



32 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

discussing if railway catastrophes are good or bad. 
It is a business of stopping the mad engine, and two- 
thirds of the world are now occupied with that 
task. 

This experience was worthless for those who had 
found without it, or would have found, a noble 
sense to life and to work. It was just enlighten- 
ing to those who ignored themselves, and had their 
own value revealed to themselves, through it. To 
most it was but the opportunity to manifest what they 
unconsciously were. For some, for very few, it 
meant a magnificent display of their best qualities 
and gave a full employment to their means. I 
think, for instance, of the aviators, who are the 
very definite product of a generation formed 
through love of science, sport and self-sacrifice. 

I felt, when I happened to visit them in the field, 
that I met the very exceptional heroes for whom this 
war meant (as it did for all fighters in other times) 
intense individual expression of power, courage and 
intelligence. For them at least war meant exalted 
form of life. . 

But our largest hope is in another element, more 
and more numerous, and which does much, thinks 
more, and speaks little in this moment. Have you 
seen a drawing by Bernard Naudin, picturing "Le 



THE PRESENT GENERATION 33 

Bleuet"? Le Bleuet is the young soldier from the 
classes of 1914, '15, '16, '17, called during the 
war. He is now from eighteen to twenty-two. The 
young man who is now about to enter the fight, after 
he had had three years of moral preparation through 
the fight carried on by his elders, is a new kind of 
man. 

He grew up aware of the near presence of death. 
He faced in their sternest reality the duties and 
conflicts of personal life, family life, national life. 
He and his comrades will be fit to lead us after 
the war. They must be our leaders. 

The salvation of France will be to let herself be 
led by her men of twenty, when they come back. 
They know evidently more than we do about the 
present time. They have our experience plus their 
own. They can see our schemes meeting realiza- 
tion or failure; our dreams become their schemes, 
and they have dreams in their turn which we can- 
not guess, and which will come true — as our night- 
mares did. For it appears that these men have 
deep and reasonable faith in themselves. 

Last year, in Salonica, Gaston Cherau told me this 
anecdote: The young recruits from the class of 
1915 had seen their first battle, and had behaved 
splendidly. After it, an old officer was congratulat- 
ing them, and, briskly, although he had tears in his 



34 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

eyes, told some of them: " You are wonderful 
boys, all of you." A young fellow replied: 
Oh, Captam, that's nothing. But wait a minute 
till you see those from the class of '16— then you'll 
see something! " 



II 

ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 

The capital fact of the present evolution. Its prophets. 
America's work during the first part of the war. Conditions 
of international leadership. Perils of "know-nothingism." 
The value of common experience. The value of common 
purpose. War and Democracy. The pacifists from the 
trenches. Our "prussianization." Common sense and our 
aims. 

The hoy enlisted. Then he told his father, who 
asked him what his motives were: 

''Well, this treatment of the Belgians got on 
my nerves at last." 

These United States. This young country — this 
old country in the experience of democracy. A 
great, successful experience, easy but for one dread- 
ful crisis, when the land was divided and bleeding 
for live years. And now, meeting for the first time 
an actual world task. 

I have tried to set aside the thousands of small 
episodes and observations which I have gathered 
during my presence in this country, and to isolate 
the main striking significance of the last event. I 
see it as follows: 

The nation is of two broad categories, having 

35 



36 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

practically nothing in common but the name of 
American, and ideals which have never had an op- 
portunity to appear to be common. First, the fam- 
ilies who lived in America in the time of the Civil 
War, then those who have arrived since. The first, 
mostly of English, Irish, Dutch and French descent. 
The latter German, Slav, Jewish, Italian, Syrian, 
etc. The first had colonized and organized the New 
World, and lived through the crisis which put its 
very existence in question. The latter came to a 
New World that was ready and achieved, and played 
an obscure part in its prosperity. Until now they 
have had no place in the ruling class, except the 
Jews who first reached the higher positions. All 
the life of the recent immigrants has been devoted 
to personal fortune and safety; they have kept a 
rather sentimental attachment to the motherland and 
the traditions of the race. Still, by their very pres- 
ence on this soil, they shared the latent ideal, which 
was tliat of public liberty and personal dignity. 
They had emigrated to find it and to find a larger 
chance of prosperity under a sky that was less heavy 
than the sky of the old empires. 

Now the New Country is agitated by the irresist- 
ible call of the world. She cannot remain isolated 
nor indifferent. The world makes too great a noise, 
and that noise comes nearer and nearer. Things 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 37 

have gone far since the torpedo which struck the 
Lusitania was heard exploding, on this shore. The 
New Country decides her ways according to the 
old principles laid by the first immigrants, but ap- 
plied to the circumstances of the present day. 
President Wilson says March 5, 1917: "We are 
provincials no longer. The tragical events of the 
thirty months of vital turmoil through which we 
have just passed have made us citizens of the 
world. There can be no turning back. Our own 
fortunes as a nation are involved, whether we would 
have it so or not. 

"And yet we are not the less Americans on that 
account. We shall be the more American if we but 
remain true to the principles in which we have been 
bred. They are not the principles of a province or 
of a single continent. We have known and boasted 
all along that they were the principles of a liberated 
mankind. . . . 

". . . All nations are equally interested in the 
peace of the world and in the political stability of 
free peoples, and equally responsible for their 
maintenance/^ 

Those historical words meant new duties for all 
America — the first and the second category. How 
did the second behave? How far did it endorse the 
attitude of the adopted country? 



38 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

I shall give an instance of it which struck me very 
strongly : 

In the heart of the great metallurgic district of 
Pennsylvania, thousands of Slavs live and work, 
men who emigrated to escape Austrian and Hun- 
garian oppression. In June, 1917, after the visit 
to this country of a Serbian colonel, Milan Pribit- 
chevich, who talked to them of the duty to help in 
the war of liberation, two thousand enlisted and 
went at once. Now they are fighting in Salonica. 

I went to Johnstown to see them depart, and it 
was a spectacle which I shall never forget. They 
were not even American citizens yet. They had 
lived here in peace, some in prosperity. They 
could never have been forced to take arms against 
the Empire from which they came. But they chose 
to revolt against it because the spirit of liberty was 
in them. I saw them receiving two flags from the 
hands of their priests, an American flag and a 
Serbian one. They took the oath to conquer or 
to die, and the two flags were solemnly blessed. 
Then those simple men, who belong to a strong, 
pure, peasant race, kissed both flags as a sign of 
equal allegiance. This was a real scene from the 
drama of the great international upheaval. 

It had a great significance. Those emigrated 
people, who are free from any oppression and can 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 39 

hear every opinion, have the right to claim that they 
represent the free creeds of their countrymen from 
oppressed lands. Now they speak little, but they 
volunteer and go, showing that this country is not 
only a refuge against tyranny, but a place where 
the energies of liberty are sufficiently abundant to 
be spread throughout over the world. 

No representative of America was there. (The 
city of Johnstown has a strong German population; 
the authorities, who were invited, did not appear.) 
The daily papers hardly mentioned this departure 
of two battalions, and probably did not notice the 
meaning of it. I am convinced that many of you 
Americans do not know the resource which is in 
those simple people, who make no advertisement 
of their feelings, but go and die for "y^^^" Prin- 
ciples. And, with differing souls, their love for 
the country rests on the same basis as that of the 
builders of America themselves. 

And when they will have given their blood, the 
last difference between you, which rested in an un- 
equal experience, will be swept out, because they 
will have shared the greatest experience of your 
civic life. 

I think this is the capital fact of the present evolu- 
tion, and all the episodes which hold the headlines 



40 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

of the daily papers are but details in it. This 
active "melting" process is the triumphant meaning 
of America, which was announced by its prophets 
in the past, and which also vibrates in the words 
of its younger poets. Whitman exclaimed: 

Brain of the New World! what a task is thine! 

To formulate the Modern . . . 

. . . Land tolerating all — accepting all. . . . 

And Witter Bynner, who wrote on the copy of his 
"New World," which he gave to me: . . ."the new 
world being both France and America," says: 

Here as I come with heaven at my side 

None of the weary words they say 

Remain with me, 

I am borne like a wave of the sea 

Towards world to be . . , ^ 

And, young and bold, 

I am happier than they — 

The timid unbelievers who grow old!" 

What happened for us in relation with the world, 
happens for the various elements of your country 
in relation with each other. The mutual acquaint- 
ance of the various races in the ranks of the national 
army will work for an even more rapid union. 

In the future, the violation of Belgium and the 
victory of the Mame will be regarded as events 
of American as well as European history, since the 
first determined the conscience of the world against 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 41 

Germany, and the second made it possible for 
America to interfere in time. Your moral prep- 
aration was, in my opinion, as rapid as it could be. 
But many elements among the best educated and in- 
formed had not waited for an official and general 
intervention. From the early days of the war 
American boys were to be found in the ambulance 
and aviation corps, American women among the 
nurses and engaged in Relief work. All this pro- 
ceeded from two virtues which I think are char- 
acteristic of America — chivalry and right intui- 
tion. I saw those qualities applied in many war 
works; I saw them give unbelievable results of 
efficiency in some instances, like the "Appui Beige," 
a French work ruled by American methods, or the 
Vacation War Relief Committee with whom I had 
the pleasure to co-operate, and who supplies our 
troops with surgical field material. 

I remember M. Jusserand telling me of the ex- 
treme delicacy and modesty of many American do- 
nators, who never wanted their name to appear, and 
often gave for our wounded more than regard for 
their own comfort would have allowed them to do. 

Indeed, America seems to be designated for a 
certain form of world-leadership, which does not 
mean a world-domination, far from it; but a stand 



42 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

that involves an example to be followed by others. 
Some countries wanted to rule the world when the 
world did not care for their rule. But the fact is 
that the world of today is eagerly expecting Amer- 
ica to play a leading part in its destinies. You do 
not realize how much an enlightened Russian, 
Frenchman, Syrian, Chinese, expects from your 
presence in the family of nations. 

But there are heavy conditions to be fulfilled by 
a moral leadership like the one which is wanted 
from both our countries. First of all, "Know-noth- 
ingism" has to be banished. America will reap the 
fruits of her clean, unaggressive, honest policy: 
her prestige everywhere is growing, which means 
immediate and concrete advantages. But America 
has to be revealed to herself with all that she con- 
tains.""^ In that respect, there is an amazing con- 
trast between the abundance and facility of in- 
formation, and the actual lack of knowledge. 

1 "America is like a vast Sargasso Sea — a prodigious welter 
of unconscious life, swept by ground-swells of half conscious 
emotions. All manner of living things are drifting in it, 
phosphorescent, gaily coloured, gathered into knots and clotted 
masses, gelatinous, unformed, flimsy, tangled, rising and fall- 
ing, floating and merging, here an immense distended belly, 
there a tiny rudimentary brain (the gross devouring the fine) — 
everywhere an unchecked, uncharted, unorganized vitality like 
that of the first chaos." (Van Wyck Brooks in America's 
Coming of Age.) 

Since these lines were written, America has entered into her 
new process of crystallization. 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 43 

A strange phenomenon of the present time de- 
serves more attention than it seems to have roused. 
It is a consequence of the opposition between inter- 
ventionists and pacifists. The first, who belonged 
to the nationalist and more conservative part of the 
country, were pushing America forward and urging 
her to take part in the world conflict, and so 
hastened her evolution. The other extreme party, 
which included the most advanced elements, was 
striving in order to hold the country back, stopping 
her on her way to intervention, and practically act- 
ing as reactionary power. The final results will 
probably bring surprises to both parties. 

We regard America as being nearly ready for 
political leadership, because the international at- 
titude of mind of the Americans is the right one. 
They are not embarrassed by old prejudices and 
methods, and have a tendency to settle things ac- 
cording to elementary human right, which they 
never lose sight of. That is why we welcome 
America in the conference of peace. 

But my hope and faith in America is not con- 
fined to that. I expect from her, very soon, some 
great artistic revelations. Her avidity to absorb 
will soon be followed by a faculty to choose and to 
reject, and then she will be ready for creation. 



44 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

which will not be an isolated exception. Already 
some splendid isolated works are showing the way. 
I find one more likeness with the French, in the 
fact that many American men and women are worth 
more than the purpose they seem to have in life. 
Are not some disputable forms of success still pur- 
sued, at the cost of happiness, health and life itself, 
by men and women of rich resource who kill in 
themselves all possibility for deep, personal, orig- 
inal life? It is because we love America so much 
that such slight disappointments do not leave us 
indifferent. 

The present crisis is bringing to the people of 
America a moral experience which can be com- 
pared with that which came to the people of France, 
in August, 1914. Of course, the experience of 
American citizens will never be the same as that of 
the Europeans. But similarly the English experi- 
ence in the war is not the French one, which in 
turn is neither the Belgian, nor the Serbian, nor 
the Polish. King Albert's situation is not Presi- 
dent Wilson's; still as a matter of fact, both took 
the same attitude towards the same challenge. 

The United States took its actual stand by a long 
considered act which consciously involves large re- 
sponsibilities. And the whole country, understand- 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 45 

ing tlie gravity of possible consequences, is making 
rapid acquaintance with that "Union Sacree" which 
in France was our first great positive experience in 
the present war. 

There was until now, in spite of our common 
principles, one tremendous difference between us. 
The people of France had first to lose their feeling 
of security and be thrown on the battlefield. Amer- 
ica had not even been made anxious for her safety. 
Now her every citizen is anxious, and thinks, and 
tries to find his way. And that anxiety is in itself 
an immense experience.. 

Now if something great is to be realized after 
the war, if we are to know, as Mr. Wilson and our 
successive Premiers have said explicitly, a peace 
maintained by an organized international will, then 
the future maintainers of that peace have first to 
understand each other, and this implies that the 
terms we use have a similar sense. What under- 
standing was possible between a European soldier 
with his three years of fighting in the trenches, with 
his experiences of danger, of anger, and of medi- 
tation in the constant face of death — and an Ameri- 
can citizen from the West? Today, the citizen 
from the West has made up his mind, has reflected 
on the government's reasons, and has endorsed the 
President's action. There was no alliance, there 



46 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

was no concerted action between us. But the facts 
are these: France which was peaceful had to 
mobilize against certain destructive forces. Amer- 
ica which is peaceful had to mobilize against the 
same forces. Thus our effort and your effort to- 
ward peaceful life had something in common, were 
it only the common drawback to its success. And 
so in the struggle to establish a lasting peace, we 
were already co-operating indirectly. Thus some 
international terms had passed from Utopia to 
reality. This may seem to be of little importance. 
Still it is capital. 

Because peace will come. We must remember 
that today throughout the world a formidable and 
resolute will exists, almost unanimous, to guar- 
antee that peace, in the future, against the intrigues 
of adventurous politics. That will exists even 
more firmly in the minds of those who do not ex- 
press it in speeches, but are fighting for it. 

In 1792 France wanted to bring liberty to the 
world. The world was not ready to receive it. 
Only the Americans, the Swiss, and the English, 
as nations, knew what the word itself meant. Most 
of the others, as the French sometime earlier, did 
not see anything more glorious than to belong to a 
prince. The world really awoke in 1848. In the 
same way the world of three years ago was not ripe 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 47 

for the general enforcement of peace. But now it 
is awake, dreadfully indeed, and waits for some- 
thing that has to come. Will you say it is Utopian, 
the international understanding which practically 
all inhabitants of the civilized world call for with 
all their hearts, and for which so many are dying? 

Well, to obtain this result of understanding, we 
have to deal with terms of common significance. 
Until February 3rd the end of the war seemed to 
announce itself as the way into an obscure, uncer- 
tain period, full of debates and disagreements, 
where three groups of Powers would be involved, 
directly or otherwise: the Allies, the Central Pow- 
ers, the neutrals. And what was there of common 
significance for those three groups of similar 
strength, and entirely dissimilar mentalities, ex- 
periences, and aspirations? 

Now let us look at the consequence of the Ameri- 
can intervention. America has broken with a na- 
tion that refused to respect treaties. It is not a 
special point of maritime right that matters here; 
it is a fundamental opposition of doctrine. Amer- 
ica refuses to admit that a nation, more than an 
individual, might suppress a law, when that law in- 
terferes with its desires. An Austrian diplomat 
said: "A nation has a right to wage a preventive 
war." He meant the attack on Serbia. Chan- 



48 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

cellor Bethmann-Hollweg said: "Necessity knows no 
law." He meant the attack on Belgium. Amer- 
ica stands firmly against these doctrines, or rather, 
this destruction of all doctrines. 

The French soldiers are standing against the 
same. For our men, with their long civic training, 
are not so stupid and so blind and so tame as to fight 
during three years of terrible and patient struggle, 
without knowing why they do it. It is not for a 
detail, but for the most decisive principles. And if 
Americans went to war, it was for similar prin- 
ciples, and not only to avenge a submarine com- 
mander's bloody fantasy. 

And now do you see the consequence, young 
American, my comrade? For the future we shall 
have the experience, in common with the whole 
civilized world, of having resisted the German at- 
tempt, just as we should have resisted any otlier: the 
ideas which we are fighting exist elsewhere, al- 
though they have been disappearing little by little. 
In Germany and Austria alone have they remained 
permanent ideas of government. 

When peace comes, we shall find ourselves to be 
one vast group of nations (your President said a 
family) instead of various groups confronting each 
other in mistrust and misunderstanding. There 
will be, as there is already potentially (and this is 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 49 

not a dream), a single ensemble wherein at least 
one common fundamental idea will have been ex- 
pressed, and even two. First — the will to preserve 
a lasting peace, and, therefore, to put into practice 
the necessary means, which had never been seri- 
ously considered, because of the lack of manifest 
faith and will on the part of the great number. 
Second — the common experience of what threatens 
peace; that is, the so-called right of the mightier, 
used as a state doctrine, such as is represented by 
imperial Germany. 

What has been lacking until now is a definite, 
clear idea to put forth in common. Here we have 
two. These are enough to begin with. 

There seems to me no doubt that Germany's eyes 
will be opened, and that she will follow, because 
there will be no choice for her. Perhaps she will 
even publish the biggest books about universal peace 
and the ways of preserving it. We shall see her 
coming slowly to understand the principles enun- 
ciated by both President Wilson and the Allies. 
Indeed, on February 3rd Mr. Wilson spoke not 
only as the leader of these states, but as a leader of 
civilization itself. We shall see Germany falling 
in line, however unwillingly, with the world. And 
that shall be our revenge for all the evil she has 
done us. 



50 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

So the hideous war which began as a last at- 
tempt for domination, will end as the first operation 
of international order and police, thanks to the 
common understanding wrought in the minds of 
even the most remote. Those whom long dis- 
tance separates from the actual conflict are now 
brought to an experience comparable with that of 
the mobilized peoples of western Europe, because 
they have acknowledged similar moral standards, 
and because information travels fast. And it will 
be the first time that practically the whole civilized 
world will have done something in common, with 
its soul and its best forces. This involves an ad- 
mirable consequence: that this world will be in 
active process of understanding before peace comes. 
Thus peace will find divergent minds already pre- 
pared to work together. Christianity itself never 
knew such a wide and mighty gathering under a 
common purpose. Now the combined forces for 
peace can work with the prospect of being stronger 
than any warlike minority that may arise; even 
those minorities allied together could not impose 
their will upon us, if us means the rest of the world. 

I believe that it will remain the great dignity of 
America that she took her stand in spite of her re- 
moteness from the major conflict, in spite of her 
immediate comfort perhaps; a stand worthy of na- 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 51 

tions who will tomorrow build the future, and who 
fight today in order to render the future possible. 



Among the many confused, contradictory im- 
pulses and interests which cross each other or com- 
bine or come into clash in the present time, one 
essential idea, or at least one word seems to be found 
everywhere, in every program and as if written in 
golden letters on every banner. The word Democ- 
racy seems to sum up the principal purposes which 
men are now fighting for. "The world has to be 
made safe for Democracy." This formula has met 
an almost unanimous assent. Of course the sense 
given to the word differs, according to parties, to 
national and, above all, to personal standpoint — as 
it happened in the French revolution with the word 
"Liberty." But, notwithstanding those variations, 
are we entitled to call the victory of Democracy 
a common purpose for the people involved in the 
struggle on one side? 

In dealing with such matters as these, I want to 
say that if my temerity is great, at least my am- 
bitions are very limited. On those two subjects 
of war and of Democracy millions of words have 
been printed, miles of paper covered with tons of 
ink and even many valuable ideas have been ex- 



52 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

pressed. My intention is not to introduce any new 
proposition or solution of my own to the world 
crisis, but to sum up the very essential elements 
which constitute the point of view of the average 
Frenchman of our times. 

It is extremely difficult to find the average man 
in France. Because we are so different from each 
other, and rather satisfied to be different. So that 
if you succeeded in discovering the average man, 
he would probably protest with the utmost energy 
and profess to be in no way an average repre- 
sentative, but simply an exceptional, independent, 
original sort of man, and this without any special 
pride or conceit, just as the next fellow would 
claim to be. One must not forget that point, for 
it will help to realize what our conception of 
Democracy is. 

But I shall try to give, at least, the view of the 
young men who have had the experience of the war, 
for they will be the most active and influential fac- 
tor in the future. 

They went to war — it is very simple — because 
their country was invaded, in spite of all efforts to 
prevent it. They went to defend France. But 
what does France mean? I am not quite sure that 
France means only a country among many others, 
— a flag, a language and a surface of land; al- 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 53 

though these things seem to many, worth fighting 
for. Will the reader agree if I say that France 
means perhaps, among other things, the land of free 
invention, discussion and experiment for social 
progress? — a living laboratory, where every new 
principle was tried (at our own expense) before 
being spread over the world? 

Perhaps they did not go to war because of that? 
But still they fought because we loved France, and 
they loved France because she meant that. 

I have explained how France, as a nation, had 
no aggressive plan at all. How we did not ex- 
pect readjustment of the injustice committed in '71 
through a war, but through some other way.^ That 
war came upon us as a consequence of the world's 
indifference about some essential problems. Now, 
what is the present feeling of the Frenchman who 
has "seen it through"? I dare say that there is 
one idea that dominates all others. And it domi- 
nates them from such a height that one could say 

1 "Remember that for over forty years, we kept in our hearts 
that open wound: Alsace-Lorraine; and we did not make war 
—we suffered in silence. Our brothers were victims of the 
most hideous system of police oppression that was ever in- 
flicted upon a free people. We knew it, and stood it because 
we wanted peace. It was not enough; since the beginning of 
the Twentieth Century we had to suffer German provocations 
in Morocco and other places. We suffered them because we 
wanted peace." (Speech of High Commissioner Andre Tardien 
before the Alliance Fran9aise of New York, Oct. 11, 1917.) 



54 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

it is not the principal idea of our men, but the only 
one : This war has to he the last one. 

Everybody is awake to that. And if you ask 
not even the cultivated man, but any of our "bon- 
hommes," in any trench in any region of the front, 
he will tell you sternly, simply: "/Fe do this, and 
we remain here, and we shall remain to the end, so 
that our children wont have to do it again." 

No, indeed, you do not know how much we do 
hate war. . . . 

We have been living for years in all the generous 
opinions which many discover today. And we do 
not abjure our faith in a better world — since we 
fight for it. To all our theoretical and reasonable 
hatred against war, we now add the hatred which 
comes through the experience of it. Why should 
a catastrophe, for which we are not responsible — 
which came by the crimes of this German ruling 
military class which thinks little — change ideas that 
we know to be true, after we had given them so 
much thought? Only there was too generous illu- 
sion in believing that other people had then reached 
our level. 

For us Napoleon's failure was a sufficient dem- 
onstration. All our liberal thought, through the 
19th century, is founded upon the conviction of 
that failure. You can find it in the writings of 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 55 

all those who embody the popular French spirit, — 
of course mixed with a great sentimental recollec- 
tion of our glories and splendors. But the Ger- 
mans derived from Napoleon's adventure only 
limitless admiration for might and conquest. They 
kept anachronistic ideals which were in vogue at 
the time of Louis XIV. Historically they belonged 
to 250 years back. 

Our men know that victory will come if they 
wait long enough, and kill and are killed until 
the enemy understands. Germany started with 
victories; but she has to meet her failure. Mili- 
tarism has to meet its failure, a failure which will 
prove the vanity of domination. Our men who 
are near to the facts and have nothing to intoxicate 
them, grimly do their grim duty, and are united 
in their fighting pacifism. For the trenches are 
peopled with pacifists, and they would resent bit- 
terly any one's saying that they like war, since 
they make it; or that they make it through blind- 
ness and credulity. 

Three days before the war broke out some of us 
had doubts about the decisions of socialists and syn- 
dicalists. These men would never, never have 
fallen in line with conquering armies. But when 
they saw that France did all that was possible to 
prevent war, that our soldiers had been withdrawn 



56 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

six miles from the border in order to avoid any 
possible incident, and that it was really a war of 
right against might, then they threw all their might 
— as did America — on the right side. It is ex- 
tremely instructive to read the articles written by 
Herve, the anti-militarist leader, who led a daily 
patriotic fight in his paper, Le Guerre Sociale. later 
La Victoire, and who was among die first to wel- 
come r Union Sacree, He saw clearly that, in or- 
der to save peace, the unchaining of war had not to 
be left successful and unchastened. He did not 
the less maintain his democratic standards, attack- 
ing the wrong use of censorship, defending free dis- 
cussion. But he joined the unanimous fight for the 
end of wars and the defeat of dangerous ambitions. 

How is this result to happen? We cannot yet 
outline the exact details, but we all believe it will 
happen through a certain common interpretation of 
democracy ; and that is why we believe in democracy 
not as a dream, but as a mighty reality, whose first 
effect will be to prevent the return of world calami- 
ties like this. 

I say: a common interpretation of democracy. 
And indeed if something like a league of nations, 
a common work for common purpose, has to be 
brought about, it can be only by a common inter- 
pretation of the term which we are now using as a 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 57 

watchword. That term, with all the various mo- 
tives that it involves, has to be carefully defined, 
again and again, in all the allied countries. The 
more we can express in common now the easier the 
task will be at the end of the war, the further we 
will be able to carry our first common results. 

Now let me tell, under my own responsibility, 
what I mean by democracy, I being a man at least 
independent from political parties, and having ob- 
served a little, in various countries of our Western 
World and of the Near East during this crisis. 

Democracy is a name for a common basis; it is 
the ground on which eVery personal, independent, 
original life can be erected. It is not an end by 
itself, as the German conception of the State or 
the Roman conception of the Empire. It is a be- 
ginning. It is not a ceiling. It is a floor; the 
main floor, for all human undertaking, to be built 
upon. It is not a limitation to individuality, it is a 
protection for it. 

And if I may express my full thought: I, as a 
Frenchman and as a writer, if I stand for Democ- 
racy it is because it off"ers the safest and most ac- 
ceptable and loyal basis for individualism. By 
individualism I don't mean egoism and selfish aims. 
The highest aim for individual life is self-sacrifice. 
But it has to be free sacrifice. Sacrifice to what 



58 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

you choose and love and want to serve. Not to a 
mechanical, artificial State which has been im- 
posed upon you, and where everything is provided 
for, except your own possibility of a choice, or 
right to a choice. 

It has been objected that in order to fight we had 
to prussianize ourselves. Yes, of course the bellig- 
erents get prussianized. . . . And what I welcome 
there is that they will have one more reason to hate 
war. But please, do not believe that after centu- 
ries of ardent struggle for more liberty a sudden 
external cause might destroy that aspiration in us. 
The spirit of liberty has deeper roots, or it would 
not be worth speaking of! France gives testimony 
that she loves liberty more than she ever did, for 
any useless restriction to her liberties provokes 
violent and ever-ready resistance. 

Our hearts have not so easily lost their robust 
love for freedom. And we had rather get ap- 
parently prussianized for a time, and disgusted 
with it, than get prussianized forever, and the world 
with us, by permitting the Prussian victory. 

That would mean intense, deep, definitive ger- 
manization of everything, and of yourselves, by the 
irresistible prestige of success. Through educa- 
tion, imitation, and through sheer necessity, German 
methods of competition would rule the world, each 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 59 

German would become a missionary of the com- 
pulsory Doctrine. Individual freedom would be 
put 100 years back. If only France had proved 
weaker, or America more indifferent, that fate 
would have been ours, and yours. That is why our 
soldiers are really dying for Democracy when they 
resist German world-domination. 

I hope that I am as far as possible from being 
paradoxical. Democracy is a matter of common 
sense, as much as art and private life are matters 
of personal sense. Things have to be made clear, 
and I suppose they are, in the mind of a great 
number, and of most of the fighting men, and they 
only need to be formulated, as they scarcely begin 
to be. 

On the origin of this war, that it is a war of 
conquest and oppression, I suppose we agree. A 
principle was violated when Austria, already de- 
taining Serbian provinces, attacked the little king- 
dom. And that principle is not a recent invention, 
although it appears to be still too new for the rulers 
of the Central Powers. It has been enunciated very 
clearly by Turgot when he said about America's 
right to independence: "It is a strange thing that 
it be not yet a commonplace truth to say that no 
nation can ever have the right to govern another 
nation ; that such a government has no other forma- 



60 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

tion than force, which is also the foundation of 
brigandage and tyranny. . . ." 

This is today a commonplace for us. It is not 
yet so for the Germans. The impulse which led 
you into this war is the same which made us go to 
your rescue, and made Franklin say of us: "This 
nation is fond of glory, particularly that of protect- 
ing the oppressed." 

Our common purpose has been splendidly de- 
fined by the President of these States. His address 
to the Senate on January 22, 1917, extending the 
Monroe doctrine to the world, already said: 
"There is no entangling alliance in a concert of 
power. When all unite to act in the same sense 
and with the same purpose, all act in the com.mon 
interest and are free to live their own lives under a 
common protection." On March 6th, he empha- 
sized the new situation of America. In his ad- 
dress of April 3, he pronounced the famous words : 

"We are at the beginning of an age in which it 
will be insisted that the same standards of conduct 
and of responsibility for wrong done shall be ob- 
served among nations and their governments that 
are observed among the individual citizens of civ- 
ilized states. . . . 

. . • "The world must be made safe for democ- 
racy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested 



ABOUT AMERICA IN 1917 61 

foundations of political liberty. We have no 
selfish ends to serve. . . .We are but one of the 
champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be 
satisfied when those rights have been made as se- 
cure as the faith and the freedom of nations can 
make them. . . . 

. . . "We shall fight for the things which we 
have always carried nearest our hearts — for democ- 
racy, for the right of those who submit to authority 
to have a voice in their own governments, for the 
rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal 
dominion of rights by such a concert of free peoples 
as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and 
make the world itself at last free." 

And the sense of our actual, of our Second Alli- 
ance, has been well defined by M. Jusserand in his 
short speech on May 3d in the House of Representa- 
tives of the United States, when he said : 

"What you do now is to come to Europe to take 
part in the fight for liberty, a fight in which you 
expect no recompense, no advantage, except that 
very great advantage, that in the same way that we 
helped to secure liberty — human liberty, individual 
liberty, national liberty — on this continent, you will 
fight to see that liberty be preserved in the broad 
family of nations. 

"Thanks to you, we shall see the calamities of 



62 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

this struggle shortened, and a new spirit of liberty 
grow greater and stronger, pervade all countries 
and indeed fill the world." 

Since then I read in the papers that when General 
Pershing landed at Boulogne, General Dumas, who 
is not a diplomat nor a theorician, but the com- 
mander of our Northern region, said to him; 

"Your coming opens a new era in the history of 
the world. The United States of America is now 
taking its part with the United States of Europe. 
Together they are about to found the United States 
of the World, which will definitely and finally end 
the war and give a peace which will be enduring and 
fruitful for humanity." 

This expresses, I think, the belief of our average 
Frenchman. And why should that hope prove to 
be vain? It is reasonable, on the contrary, since 
it expresses the will of the overwhelming majority, 
in a matter where the majority will have to decide. 

And if the result is attained once for all, then 
the huge, untold sacrifice will not have been made 
in vain. 



Ill 

PROMISES OF CONCRETE CO-OPERATION 

New conditions of work in Europe, nearer to the American 
conditions, because of the scarcity of men and the necessity of 
rapid reconstruction. American methods to be brought. The 
new spirit of economic activity in France. A writer on French 
labor. An instance of common task: co-operation in the coun- 
tries which are economically backward, but jealous of national 
independence, and will welcome the Franco-American enter- 
prises. 

First of all we must squarely face the facts. At 
the finish of the war France is going to find herself 
placed in a new and complex economic situation, 
as will also be the case with those nations bound to 
her by definite ties. Practicable suggestions for 
meeting this coming situation can be supplied only 
by men able to see and point out with equal frank- 
ness both its most encouraging and its most alarm- 
ing aspects. Nothing will be accomplished by 
those who are too easily satisfied by cut-and-dried 
formulae, who allow themselves to be hypnotized by 
fixed optimistic or pessimistic theories. The fu- 
ture is neither easy nor desperate. Only, more 

63 



64 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

than at any previous period, the future will depend 
upon ourselves. 

The situation as it exists today contains the germ 
of a brilliant tomorrow; it holds also the seeds of 
ruin. It contains possibilities that make one's heart 
leap as before the dawn of certain victory. But 
before us, too, may lie the abyss. Still, there is a 
bridge by which we may cross it. 

How shall we set to work — now, we and our 
friends? For from the day that peace is declared, 
all those energies that are now diverted to the work 
of death and destruction will be clamouring to take 
up life's work in full measure, without losing a 
moment. We shall merit small thanks from those 
who are fighting if we have made ready nothing 
against their return save shouts of joy. It is 
their right to expect more than that of our fore- 
sight. 

Never before has man been faced with a future 
so pregnant with possibilities. Now, possibilities 
entail responsibilities. And what is first and fore- 
most plain and inescapable before our eyes is the 
great responsibility that will rest upon France and 
her true friends. It is no new responsibility. We 
recognized and assumed it long ago, at whatever 
cost to us. It will continue. Who wants to share 
it with us? 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 65 

Our prestige has been restored. Frenchmen of 
today will have a far easier task than those of 
before the war, whose mission was to carry on 
France's work somehow or other, throughout a 
world rendered indifferent and sceptical by our 
defeats of 1870. They succeeded, at that; but 
they were few. Those of tomorrow will be legion. 
Like the sturdy workers that they are, resourceful 
lads, keen for their jobs, they will go forth to the 
four comers of the earth, after playing their part — 
and what a part! — in freeing the world through 
force of arms, to sow the good seed of their labours. 
And reaping the harvest to follow, France will arise, 
rich. 

For this too we must say, frankly and simply: 
"France must be rich." Therein lies the remedy 
for all her dangers and her ills — infant mortality, 
tuberculosis, and kindred scourges. Our valiant 
little family groups, endowed with all the virtues 
though they be, are frequently crushed beneath ma- 
terial difficulties, which, being excessive and over- 
whelming, go not at all to develop character. 

Similarly, it is for lack of money to buy better 
milk, for lack of money to instal bathrooms, to 
live more out of doors, to buy sports, technical edu- 
cation, recreation — for all these things are to be 
had for money — it is for lack of this money that too 



66 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

many of our children die, too many of our gifted 
young people have to stop midway in their educa- 
tion, too many of our families go downhill, too 
many of our intellectual and moral resources wither 
away before they have bloomed. We must tell 
things as they are. Pierre Hamp writes: "We 
are face to face with this moral necessity: France 
must be rich." 

Now the world has everything to gain by seeing 
to it that the fruit in France's garden does not dry 
up, and the world is well aware of it. France is no 
greedy power, undertaking to dominate through 
numbers, through intrusion and invasion, and 
against whom the world must ever be on its guard. 
France is a well-spring of creative power, a land 
of spiritual, scientific, and social experiments and 
experiences. All mankind suffers a little by her 
distress, and profits by her prosperity. Let her 
emerge rich from the great effort she is about to put 
forth, and those who go to her will find her happier. 
Those who have been wont to look to her for in- 
spiration will find an .even more abundant treasure 
within her gates. Those who trade with her will 
have a chance both to give and receive more. 

What are the obstacles in the way of this pros- 
perity? Our small population? Certainly not. 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 67 

Inferior numbers are a menace in case of war — we 
know that only too well! But on the other hand 
the nation overdensely populated is the one that 
finds itself handicapped in the attempt to assign 
congenial work to all its citizens. 

No, the obstacles can be reduced to two funda- 
mental ones: First, the world's imperfect informa- 
tion about us and our ways, partly through our own 
fault; second, some mistaken and prejudiced indi- 
vidual viewpoints that especially characterized our 
fellow-countrymen of the past half -century. It is 
to overcome the first of these handicaps that The 
New France magazine has undertaken its task, a 
task long awaited and long called-for.^ I wish here 
to say a few additional words as to the other 
obstacle to our expansion. 

Mistaken viewpoints on the part of individuals, 
I said. Indeed, henceforth it is vitally important 
that every one of us assume his responsibilities to 
the full, and rely as little as possible upon the State 
and public organizations. We are, as is also the 

1 These lines were written for the magazine, New France, 
and published in its first issue, August, 1917. The purpose of 
the magazine is to prepare for the future by giving expression 
to Franco-American ideas upon commercial developments and 
to promote the spirit of practical co-operation between the 
two countries. The editors are Denys Amiel, Swinburne Hale 
and Deems Taylor, and its address is 165 Broadway, New 
York. 



68 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

United States, an individualist nation. Let us be 
so, frankly and utterly. Above all, let us pro- 
mote personal intercourse, the relations of man 
to man — particularly among the younger men, 
who will be especially unfettered in their future 
activities. 

Let me repeat: what will save us is an intensive 
development of a personal sense of responsibility. 
Man must consent to being judged, not according to 
what he is or what he can do, but by what he has 
actually done, what values he is actually creating. 
This method is unjust, possibly; but the world has 
no time to learn others. Now the French have 
always kept their good qualities below the surface, 
in the form, rather, of potentialities. Travelling 
through Germany in 1913, I saw clearly that the 
prosperity of that empire was due, not so much to 
its organization — and still less to any exceptional 
qualities of the German — as to a patient and pains- 
taking development of every resource. 

We French have chosen rather to keep our re- 
sources locked up, to hold them in reserve, like the 
hidden treasure that economists call "unproductive 
wealth." Among prosperous peoples, the secret of 
success lies not in such and such a particular qual- 
ity, to be found nowhere else; it lies in mobilizing 
all their capabilities. And so reforms must be 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 69 

accomplished, not through the State, nor by means 
of treaties, but through the medium of every indi- 
vidual intelligence, every will. 

Understand me clearly: I do not set up material 
success as the only goal of French activities ; but, if 
one be an intelligent Frenchman, engaged in busi- 
ness, a wide ambition is his first duty. 

Now, unless we entirely misunderstand the ten- 
dencies of our younger men, that is on the whole 
just the direction in which the rising generation is 
tending. Ignorance of other countries, which so 
held back our predecessors, had already begun to 
disappear during the past ten years, thanks to nu- 
merous outside influences, to an exchange of views 
that was continuously developing — an intellectual 
exchange with England, America, and Russia. 
This intermingling has been hastened during the 
course of the war by the presence of so many for- 
eign armies upon our soil, and by the countless 
personal relations that necessarily resulted. Of 
course, you will always find youths who are deter- 
mined not to learn anything, but there will be fewer 
and fewer of them in the future, and they will be 
less and less proud of their ignorance. On the 
whole, it would seem that, as far as ignorance of 
the outside world is concerned, France is by no 



70 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

means the least informed. But we must not forget 
that the best is expected from us. 

There is one essential element of the French char- 
acter, much more inherent in us than ignorance of 
other peoples, which, it seems to me, explains the 
cause of certain of our failings and at the same time 
offers us our best hope for co-operation between the 
young men of America and France. That is, our 
tendency to criticise — a certain intellectual, critical, 
negative tendency, which too easily turns into mock- 
ery. It is the faculty to which the best of us owe 
their sense of proportion and the clear thinking for 
which they are noted. Now, the American is gifted 
with precisely the opposite faculty — a positive, en- 
terprising tendency to go after immediate results. 
He is embarrassed by very few hesitations, since up 
to the present the obstacles before him in his own 
country, which is always a fruitful field for new 
enterprises, have been much less serious than in 
ours. 

Today, however, conditions in the two countries 
are growing more and more alike. America is no 
longer a limitless field open to virgin energy, while 
old Europe is becoming committed to a policy of 
hasty reconstruction and wide enterprise. Thus 
our differences are being levelled; and thus may 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 71 

each of us profit more and more by the experience 
and methods of the other. 

And so a double obligation rests upon us: for 
America, that of reconciling its methods with new 
conditions; for France, that of adopting new ways 
of putting to work the vast treasure of past experi- 
ence, knowledge, and resourcefulness that the ages 
have bequeathed to our race. If both of us will 
resolve to combine this inherited craft skill and 
science of life with your audacity, your passion for 
visible and immediate results, little success will re- 
main beyond our reach. 

After all, our activities rest upon a common base, 
upon a feeling which tends to bring us together and 
through which we seem, to me, to be blood-brothers 
among the peoples of the world. That feeling is 
the love of work for its own sake, love of the task 
that we have freely chosen. Our devotion to this 
work is limitless, provided always that our right to 
a free choice be respected. Now it is just this right 
of free choice that characterizes the "kind of world" 
in which we want to live, as opposed to the super- 
disciplined "State" world in which our enemies 
want to make us live — a kind of world that suits 
them, maybe, but that inspires us with little but 
horror. 



72 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

We believe, Americans and French alike (and 
here I speak above all in the name of the younger 
generation), in the free choice of a lifework. We 
believe that into this chosen calling one can put the 
best of himself, serving whole-heartedly because he 
knows that there exists no better or more fruitful 
field for the forces at his disposal. We believe that 
once our efficiency is brought to its highest through 
this faith in our work, we have nothing to fear from 
the competition of any one. We believe that a 
calling freely chosen is like a wife chosen from 
among all women: that, like her, it will bear us fine 
children. 

What an ugly, vulgar, stupid idea it is, to con- 
ceive of the whole of human activity as a pitched 
battle where the victory of one necessarily entails 
the ruin of others. It is a worn-out and thick-witted 
theory, worthy only of jealous and greedy peoples. 
France and America have never admitted its truth, 
knowing full well that the world profited by every 
step they made forward. They have always felt 
that, in reality, nations should be set, not one 
against the other, but side by side, so as to face 
together the increasingly complex problems of life. 
(Thus did Peguy describe the philosophers, and 
point out the true significance of their competitions 



j PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 73 

and quarrels.) It is thus that we conceive the 
energies of the world drawn up to weather the fear- 
ful crisis that has arrayed them together against a 
common danger. If the world, co-operating to 
assure the necessary defeat of Germany's lust for 
conquest, has been able to unite upon this negative 
program, what is to prevent it from organizing 
tomorrow upon a positive, lasting basis? Why can 
it not unite and found itself upon the rock of the 
most enduring sentiment that is rooted in the heart 
of man: the love of one's own handiwork? 

It is the young men of America and France who 
shall offer us not one, but millions of examples of 
the goal that may be attained, the results that may 
be realized through a voluntary alliance like ours, 
when sprung into full life. 

Love for work — Do you realize how deeply 
that love is rooted in the Frenchman's heart? 

A writer, Pierre Hamp, has given strong, vivid, 
accurate descriptions of the labourious life of 
France. He makes us discover the molecular proc- 
ess of the trades and industries, a process which is 
not much known. He himself, like Jack London, 
has had a long direct experience of the things he de- 
scribes, before he became an Inspector of Labour. 
His former work includes several books: Le Rail 



74 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

(he was then a railway man), Maree Fraiche (he 
had been a sailor too) , Vin de Champagne (he loiew 
the details of its whole fabrication) . But I want to 
present only his three little, dense booklets, pub- 
lished during the war. Perhaps they are the most 
valuable contribution to knowledge of the actual 
conditions among the civil working class during 
the crisis. You will find there much which will 
surprise you. . . . 

The first of these books, Le Travail Invincible, is 
a picture of the conditions of work in Northern 
France. 

"Flanders had seen the passing of the great Bel- 
gian migration, pushed on by the German army — 
flax-pickers of the Courtrai region, still carrying 
their blue wallets, straggling crowds of women 
dragging along tired children. In their wake, the 
Flemings of France were leaving also, fleeing their 
villages wrecked by German shells. The fugitives 
filled the railroad trains to overflowing, crammed, 
standing, into coal cars. Across Flanders, from 
La Bassee to the Yser, was one great battle. The 
Germans fell back, freeing Hazebrouck, Bailleul, 
and Armentieres. But their trenches stretched be- 
fore this treasure house ; Lille, Roubaix, and Tour- 
coing. 

"In all this upheaval and destruction what be- 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 75 

came of industry? Factories all over the region 
had been damaged by artillery fire. Thousands of 
skilled workmen had been driven into exile — an 
exile often deadlier, through overcrowding, starva- 
tion, and cold, than the bombardment suffered by 
those who stayed behind. But no sooner were the 
Germans gone than the people began to come back 
and resume work. The industrial 'front' kept 
pace with the firing line. This movement will be 
a magnificent one to follow in some future system- 
atized history of labour during the war. In the 
valley of the Lys, the weaving mills stopped work 
on the 6th of October, halted by the bombardment. 
On October 15th the Germans were repulsed; by 
the 25th, the cloth-looms were whirring and clash- 
ing again in the mills. Whenever their noise 
stopped, at lunch-hour and at night, one could hear 
the musketry fire in the trenches. 

"When the German army bombards an open 
town, a town whose streets end in the furrows of the 
fields, it claims to be accomplishing the legitimate 
military objects of striking demoralization and ter- 
ror into the civilian population. This is so, at the 
first bombardment. Those who are terrified flee. 
By the time the second bombardment takes place 
the town has taken its precautions and has com- 
fortably fitted up its cellars. By the tenth bom- 



76 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

bardment it is a town inured to war. The persist- 
ence of the German artilleryman has created a new 
virtue; under habitual fire the civilian population 
displays the firmness of veteran troops. 

"The cellars are used for sleeping, the best fitted 
having a fame of their own. Some of them are 
comfortably furnished, with cloth hangings on the 
walls. The cellar windows are blocked with sand 
bags or bulwarks, each of the latter consisting of 
two timbers with the crack between them stuffed 
with rubbish. These cave fortifications encroach 
upon the sidewalks all along the streets. 

"The night bombardment is the less dangerous. 
By day, blood is more quickly shed when the town is 
caught unawares. Summer is the season of street 
games for the little ones, and the first shell of the 
morning may fall near three children who are 
quietly playing together before their house. Their 
mothers had said 'Don't go far!' and they have 
been very obedient; but they will never return to 
their mothers' knees. 

"The town that no longer knows fear feels indig- 
nation. The tiny corpse of a child instils a horror 
of Germany within the breasts of those who follow 
it to the grave. No more may her citizens come 
here to trade or to supply machinery." 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 77 

And in the fields the peasant shows the same 
faithfulness to the task: 

"English and German shells pass over the tilled 
fields, and the husbandman can hear the rifle fire 
in the trenches. Ever since November it has been 
coming from exactly the same places. Now, how- 
ever, it seems as though the subterranean battle had 
moved further off; the noise is muffled. As the 
ears of grain grow, the sound of rifle shots is corre- 
spondingly absorbed by the thickness of the ver- 
dure. 

"This labourer is unconquerable. The tilling of 
the earth imposes an obligation which nothing can 
remove, not even the risk of death. For the man of 
the fields, war is only a passing storm. He bows 
before it, and continues his task, big with eternity." 

Pierre Hamp adds; "There is a humble great- 
ness about these civilians who hold so doggedly to 
their everyday jobs, these factory women who brave 
shells to go to work. Next to the soldier who de- 
fends the soil, the factory girl who sticks to her 
work is the one who makes France immortal. . . . 
The moral value of work increases in war-time, 
when the idleness of non-combatants might easily 
injure the morale of the whole race, and might 
lower the earning capacity of the labouring classes 



78 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

through loss of skill. Tliese working girls who, as 
they put it, don't want to get out of practice, and go 
on at their task, are saving the basic power of the 
country — a thing that must never perish. War is 
transitory. Labour is eternal." 

And he concludes: "Man's purest grandeur 
resides in plying well his trade. It is not enthusi- 
asm that he needs for this, but professional con- 



science." 



I gave long quotations, because I find this one 
of the most valuable war accounts that I know. 

The second booklet is perhaps the richest in docu- 
mentation on the new conditions of work, much 
nearer to American conditions because of the 
scarcity of men. (That is why, after the war, we 
shall have so much to learn from your methods.) 
Already Hamp is able to foresee the reach of pos- 
sible application of these methods. 

"The American method is above all applicable 
to industries turning out large quantities of the 
same pattern of objects — automobiles, typewriters, 
or shells — and where the total amount of work in- 
volved in making a product that is always unvary- 
ing can be subdivided into separate operations. 

"It would be fantastic to attempt to apply the 
American method unaltered to the French nation. 
It must be gallicized and made over to suit our 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 79 

labouring-class mental processes. Experiment 
alone will show where it can be welded to our sys- 
tem and where there are gaps to bridge. It would 
break down everything to apply a concept based 
and calculated solely upon new forces and ideas 
to a society permeated with old forces and tra- 
ditions." 

So there will be an adjustment, and it will require 
much attention and mutual understanding. Hamp 
then treats the difficult matter of emigration, 
which, too, demands unprejudiced minds in order 
to be solved according to the actual require- 
ments of a country. Then he reveals what the 
work of the women has been, during the war, 
and what tremendous step has been made in that 
respect. "Woman has not suddenly become 
courageous with the war. She merely continues to 
be so. Having been already engaged in a great 
variety of occupations, she had some preliminary 
training when she turned to metallurgy for war pur- 
poses." In the shell factories hundreds of thou- 
sands of them are now working. Hamp notices that 
even there they remain women, and this is together 
charming and melancholic. 

"They bind their heads with a piece of linen to 
protect their hair from the dust of glowing iron, 
incidentally leaving a curl or two to wander — for 



80 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

in all her tasks, hard as they may be, nothing will 
take away from woman her desire to be attractive. 
The instinct for beauty is unconquerable in her. 
Even here, where woman is identified with man in 
her work, and where the social necessities have 
tended to deprive her of her sex, she preserves the 
remnants of her charm, and keeps on smiling to 
save a world that is destroying itself. 

"No workshop, however dusty, hot or smelly, has 
ever conquered the desire of woman to remain a 
woman. Exhausted, overheated, and pale, she still 
smiles. She accomplishes this double and terrible 
task — ^to work as much as a man and at the same 
time preserve the softness of the world and per- 
petuate the race. 

"It was formerly thought that woman's care could 
not be trusted when very exact measurements had 
to be made, but the eyes of an embroiderer are 
sharper than those of a man, and machines for mak- 
ing light artillery presented few difficulties to her. 
The adjustment and testing of a shell fuse require 
careful attention; no defects are tolerated. The 
adjuster has to discover errors that the workmen 
have overlooked. This delicate work is just the 
reverse of the heavy forging, as the working woman 
uses only her eyes and the tips of her fingers. 
Long tables are covered with copper pieces ar- 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 81 

ranged in perfect order. The women must make 
sure that every piece is in perfect condition and 
exact in calibre, by means of delicate steel gauges, 
for the slightest defect may prevent the shell from 
exploding or make it explode in the guns. No mag- 
nifying glass is used for this operation, lest the con- 
sequent exaggeration of mere scratches should make 
them appear as serious defects and cause all shells 
to be rejected. The naked eye must suffice, and a 
sharp look-out is needed to discover all the tool 
marks. Since this means a great strain on the 
eyes all such work is done by daylight for fear of 
errors resulting from fatigue. 

"In a shop where 844 women are employed, only 
three defective adjustments out of 80,000 fuses 
were noted by the inspectors and, after examina- 
tion, only one fuse was discarded. Thus in such 
an amount of delicate work requiring so much at- 
tention, only one mistake was discovered — one in 
80,000 — in a day chosen at random by the inspec- 
tors. Sometimes there is not a single mistake." 

Her salary has grown, and if it seems low com- 
pared with American prices, still it is much higher 
than the former wages of a dressmaker. It is now 
about one dollar a day for the easier work. Better 
skilled workers may reach 9 francs for ten hours. 

"Women from all classes of society have applied 



82 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

for jobs in metal working for war purposes. The 
offices of workshops know of women who walked 
by ten times before they decided to step in, and 
finally did so with tears in their eyes, on account of 
their prejudice against working with their hands. 
One of them was a Belgian lady of leisure whose 
fortune was left in Brussels; another, the wife of a 
South American bank director. In a few days, un- 
accustomed as these women were to such work, 
they had learned how to handle machine tools. In 
a month they had become skilful. The adaptation 
to work of women's delicate hands does not require 
a long time. Embroidery, sewing and household 
occupations have all accustomed them to the hand- 
ling of materials. The power to work is in them. 

"The hands of so many men never touch anything 
but cigarettes and penholders. This war has re- 
vealed the great adaptability of woman to manual 
labour. She succeeds in all trades, both in the 
hardest and in the most delicate. 

"Out of 4,473 women workers brought together 
in a shell factory in Lyons, there are registered: 

1,326 housewives and servants; 
1,320 dressmakers; 

690 shop workers; 

360 office girls; 
23 stenographers; 

349 lacemakers, weavers and box-makers; 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 83 

143 of various trades; 
236 without any profession; 
16 mechanics. 

"These women, among whom five per cent, only 
had any previous experience with some minor form 
of metal working, have in a few months, thanks to 
cleverly devised machinery, developed a strong and 
efficient working body. They have replaced 44.9 
per cent, of the men in a total of 9,985 employes." 

Of course, immense social consequences are to 
result from such possibilities which woman dis- 
covered in herself. "A woman whose living is in- 
sured by employment will feel independent in her 
home. How will fairly well-paid labour react upon 
the woman's heart?" There is a conflict between 
motherhood and work. Pierre Hamp's conclusion 
brings a very enlightening interpretation of the 
present situation: 

"Our national interest of the moment is directly 
opposed to our permanent national interest, to what 
really constitutes the perpetuation of France: a 
sufficient number of Frenchmen. A proper con- 
cern for our prosperity demands that we turn our- 
selves deliberately into a country of immigration, 
attracting healthy stock and reducing our neces- 
sary working forces as far as possible by the in- 
genuity of mechanical inventions^'* 



84 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

Here again, we find the necessity of carefully 
adopting American example. For this we are con- 
fident in the infinite resources of improvisation 
which are in the race: 

"This labouring force of France, which must al- 
ways be organized in times of need, has had its 
total strength calculated by the war, has shown its 
full vitality and flexibility. Victorious, it will 
have learned through perils its possibilities for 
triumph in time of peace. All that it was called 
upon to do, it has done. It will go on doing so. 
Experienced by an effort tliat aroused it to activ- 
ity from the first rifle to the last hammer, the na- 
tion learned that it could devour the maddened 
enemy with its cannon and reap a triumphant for- 
tune from its labour. From France's war strength 
will spring her peace strength. She has been 
through an experience that has revealed her to her- 
self. She will know how to make her strength a 
lasting one by maintaining for her industry the 
power called forth by battle. Her organization for 
military victory will also help to create her in- 
dustrial rank. And may she make peace with 
the same spirit with which she has made war. 
Every victory is within her. From France the 
warrior country will arise France the labouring 
country." 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 85 

Hamp's third pamplet, "La Victoire de la 
France sur les Frangais," is more of a program and 
an affirmation of general ideas about the future of 
France. He points out the dangers, and outlines 
the remedies. The victory over alcohol is won, if 
the measures taken against it in time of war are 
maintained. But France wants a reform in her 
habits of mind and methods of action. A victory 
of the Frenchman over himself, or rather of the 
immortal spirit of France over temporary hesita- 
tions. This reform was rapidly preparing before 
the war. " May the young men who have helped 
to write Victory upon the banners of their regi- 
ments strive with equal might to place the names of 
foreign branches upon the letterheads of our com- 
mercial houses." 

And there is an expression of unlimited hope to 
be found in his last conclusions : 

"The power latent within us is unknown even to 
ourselves. We bear within our breasts triumphs 
as yet unawakened. Our strength in this war has 
surprised ourselves. Under the shock of reality 
we have discovered anew our ancient valour and 
the strength of our limbs. France is far above the 
conception that the world had formed of her and 
that she had formed of herself. Let us venerate 
this mysterious power of our race, whence spring 



86 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

victories for men to wonder at. . . . Let us not 
doubt ourselves. We are perfectly capable of tre- 
mendous and prolonged effort. We can conquer 
all within ourselves that threatens France." 



Of course, I realize that much that I have said 
about the possibilities of our concrete co-operation 
is abstract and vague, and that the young American 
who reads me has no taste for indulging in uncer- 
tain schemes, but wants immediate instances, or at 
least instances likely to be valuable immediately 
after the war. He may argue that everybody 
should then make good, and ask if French co-opera- 
tion will offer a chance to him rather than to his 
grandchildren. 

Let me show that I had some immediate instance 
in mind. It is a local and definite one, and I give 
it because I happen to know the subject well. I 
suppose that other Frenchmen, if questioned, can 
give many instances like this one, which has to be 
generalized. 

I have travelled on five occasions in the Balkans, 
especially through Serbia and the Southern Slav 
countries. These people are the only strong ob- 
stacle to Pan-Germanism on its way to the East. 
They are sturdy and fine. They are warriors and 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 87 

artists. They love their nation and have decided 
that she shall not die. They have suffered from 
the war more than any other people, except, per- 
haps, the Armenians and the Poles. But there are 
still about 12 millions of them, resolved to struggle 
ceaselessly until they obtain freedom for their 
Jugoslav (Southern Slav) nation. That is a sim- 
ple and irresistible aspiration, and, like America, 
Italy and Switzerland in older times, they will suc- 
ceed because their will is steadfast and their oppo- 
nents are changing their artificial policies according 
to circumstances. Their situation is like Bohe- 
mia's, and Poland's. When these people are free, 
then Europe will have a chance of peace, not be- 
fore. That much even the diplomats admit today. 
So there is an increasing probability of an early 
and righteous settlement of this national question.^ 
Now look at this Jugoslavia made free. It in- 
cludes Serbia restored, and the Austro-Hungarian 
provinces which are almost entirely peopled by 
Serbians and their brothers, the Croats and 
Slovenes. It extends from the vicinity of Italian 
Trieste to the province of Temesvar, from the Adri- 
atic coast to the Bulgarian frontier, where the 
Orient racially begins. Even if national aspira- 

1 See the books of H. Wickham Steed, R. W. Seton-Watson, 
etc. 



88 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

tions are not fully realized at first, it will have 
outlets on the Adriatic Sea, which means direct and 
free communication with all Western nations. The 
area of the land is equal to about one-half of 
France. It contains many mines (the copper mines 
at Bor were the most prosperous in the world, and 
were exploited by a French concern), large for- 
ests, great wealth in fruit, fish, and cattle, and large 
industries of cloth, embroideries, silverwork, etc. 

Jugoslavia has been maintained for ages in a 
state economically backward because all the forces 
of the country were employed in a military strug- 
gle against invasion and resistance to oppression. 
Conditions were made as hard as possible by 
mighty Austria, for fear that the national spirit 
would spread from free Serbia to oppressed 
Bosnia, Croatia and Dalmatia. 

In the near future, a tremendous economic ex- 
pansion will take place there. The race is very 
laborious. But the people are poor, and lack the 
technicians and the machines. Who will bring 
them? Assuredly not the Germans. Even before 
this war the Serbians preferred to sacrifice large 
advantages to permitting themselves to be invaded 
through economic participation on the part of am- 
bitious and hostile countries. 

For a similar reason they will hardly welcome 



PROMISES OF CO-OPERATION 89 

the rush of business men, speculators and exploiters 
from some countries, although friendly, for they 
are too jealous of their national integrity to allow 
important positions to be occupied by foreigners 
who may at some time become exigent and, if 
backed by their governments, jeopardize the safety 
of the country. Small nations have to be cautious 
about such things. 

But from France and from America nothing of 
that kind is to be feared — we could not even dream 
of territorial ambitions in those regions. And it 
happens that America and France are the only two 
nations who have accomplished a great deal for the 
Southern Slavs — France, by a long tradition of 
friendship, by helping to rebuild the Serbian army 
at Corfu and maintaining the occupation of Salon- 
ica, also by welcoming the Serbian refugees on her 
territory, and taking up the education of Serbian 
children; America by steady and generous relief 
and the sending of surgical and medical missions 
who have done most effective work. 

After the war, if my previsions are right, Franco- 
American activity will find a most favourable 
ground in Jugoslavia, America bringing her meth- 
ods and material, France bringing the experience of 
her men, long used to travel diere and to business 
negotiations with the Serbians, being entirely sym- 



90 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

pathetic to them and having fought side by side 
with them. 

But what special interest will young America 
have in bringing resources of energy to that part 
of the world? First, the opportunities for rapid 
success are numerous: reconstruction of cities on 
modern plans, undertaking of large harbours, the 
lumber industry, agricultural improvements, means 
of transportation. The country is healthful and the 
peasants are intensely democratic. Many young 
men want broad enterprises and wish also to live 
within reasonable proximity to civilized centres. 
They and their wives will appreciate the fact that 
Southern Slav territory is a few hours from Italy, 
and one day and a half from Paris. 

I shall not dwell on this suggestion. It is but 
one instance among many, of the wide activities 
open to American initiative. Russia is another — 
much wider, but more distant from the great cities 
of Western Europe. There again, the true form 
of successful association would be Franco-Ameri- 
can. More exactly, young men from France and 
young men from America, knowing each other well. 
And the same is applicable to our colonies. 



IV 
LITERARY INTERCHANGE 

Forms of influence. Is external influence to be welcome? 
American writers who are known in France. About French 
criticism. Translations of literature. Educational exchanges. 
The philosophers. The literary treasury of contemporary 
France. Our masters and elders. Recent tendencies. Emile 
Verhaeren's international value. The new poets of France: 
More children of Walt Whitman. Schools, groups and critics. 
The Reviews. War poems. "And then? Music in France. 

We have dealt with the concrete foundations and 
structure of our alliance. Our material exchanges 
and co-operation will give results little by little. 
As early as today we may see the effects of mu- 
tual intellectual influence. 

Here again, the field is too wide to be covered in 
its entirety. Even to show the parallel evolution 
and the mutual indebtedness of American and 
French literary standards in the past 25 years, 
would be the task of a lifetime and, when achieved, 
it would have to be started again. 

So as to grasp the present condition of our liter- 
ary relation, we may specially concern ourselves 
with the poets. The best of the young poets sup- 

91 



92 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

ply the essential expression of a generation, they 
are usually in advance of it, and they inspire the 
period which follows. Moreover, they supply the 
most conscious form of art and that which is most 
closely connected with ethics. Poets are essen- 
tially initiators, and the literary production of 
the following epoch largely depends upon them. 
The work of American orators and novelists might 
have been regarded mainly as a branch of Eng- 
lish literature until American poets came and gave 
the start to new forms of expression and discov- 
ered fresh sources of inspiration. After them 
there was an original American literature. A 
good part of political and social ideals is influ- 
enced by poets. This may not be true of the sad 
epoch that preceded us, but it was true of most 
great epochs whose grandeur was often formulated 
or even foretold by poets. The Italian and French 
Renaissance, the Italian Risorgimento in the 19th 
century, the liberal agitation in Germany about 
1848,^ the national movements in India and in 
Ireland had their poets who were their leaders at 
the same time. In America, I see the germ of an 
approaching poetical expansion which may be 

1 See the recent book about Georg Herwegh, the great revo- 
lutionary poet who fought Prussianism all his life. (Recueil 
Sirey, publisher, Paris.) 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 93 

splendid. In France what has already been ac- 
complished I shall try to sum up here. The ques- 
tion is, What is and what will be the reciprocal ac- 
tion of our writers? 

Let us go back for a while. The mere nomen- 
clature of your great writers who had a part in the 
intellectual and esthetical formation of our own 
would not be so soon achieved as your modesty 
might suppose. I was 10 years old when I read 
Fenimore Cooper. I was 12 when I was presented 
with Uncle Toms Cabin, 15 when I knew Long- 
fellow. At 19 I read ^Poe, with the utmost ad- 
miration at the very time that I knew the works of 
the French Symbolist school. I could see what im- 
mense importance Edgar Allan Poe had had for 
those pure artists against whom we reacted, but 
from whom we descend all the same. . . . Poe had 
strongly impressed Baudelaire, who translated his 
tales, and Mallarme did the same for the poems. 

I was 23 when I plunged myself into the Leaves 
of Grass. This succession is that of decreasing 
popularity. I hear that S. Butler and Thoreau are 
being translated into French, and that a new French 
edition of Whitman will soon appear, our best 
writers having co-operated in the work of transla- 
tion. Some of your other writers are nearly un- 
known in France. Hawthorne, Whittier, Bret 



94 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

Harte have practically never reached there. As for 
the influence of French writers on your own pro- 
ductions, I leave it to American scholars to define. 

The literature of a country may be influenced, 
from abroad, in two principal ways. First, by 
foreign writers who are admired, absorbed, imi- 
tated. Second, by the readers which are abroad, 
of works from one's own country, readers who 
accept or reject those works. As the majority of 
foreign readers are informed and cultivated, the 
more this last becomes important. 

In the instance of our two countries, this is how 
I understand our literary relations: The greatest 
need for France will be to feel the abundant, vigor- 
ous, generous production of your young writers 
whose inspiration is related to her own. If we 
happen to hesitate they will reassure us, owing to 
their solid virtue of genuine and direct inspiration. 
And your writers themselves declare that they will 
welcome the critical sanction of our older literary 
sense. 

Then there is also that reciprocal influence which 
will develop from the French reader to the Ameri- 
can writer. If our relations hold their promise, 
works written here will be eagerly read, either in 
English or in translation, by our people, who will 
see more and more what resources of vitality and 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 95 

sincerity are in you. And the French reader, when 
his sympathy is once aroused, and his negative sense 
withdrawn a little, is not too bad a critic. We are 
all of us everywhere too prone to pass sentence on 
things before we have made acquaintance with them. 
But when France's admiration is fixed her choice is 
usually the right one. Perhaps this is because we 
have still some traces of classical sense left, and 
classical is to time what universal is to space. 
Thus it is not surprising that a good training in 
classical should prepare for a sound appreciation 
of universal literature. - 

Criticism, applied to your work, I propose, of 
course, in a quite modest form. If the French do 
not appreciate a book of yours, it does not prove 
that the book is bad. But if they elect it, admire 
it, love it, adopt and imitate it, and get impregnated 
with it, as they have in instances already, then you 
may be sure that you have a right to be proud of 
its author. 

Having said this, is it necessary to raise once 
more the eternal question : Are influences good in 
themselves? Is foreign influence to be desired or 
to be feared? My opinion is that of many of our 
contemporaries. It is that inasmuch as you are 
strong and have faith and confidence in yourself, 
you can welcome most unreservedly the influences 



96 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

from abroad, fearless that they will carry you out 
of yourself. Convinced traditionalists ought to be 
the first to welcome new influences, first because our 
very traditions (yours and mine) are largely made 
of foreign influences which were assimilated; an 
additional reason for such welcome is that the 
shock and criticism of the foreign thing give pre- 
cisely the opportunity needed for testing one's own 
solidity. And a certain, solid, faithful, valuable 
tradition need not be afraid of the test. We real- 
ize that our stomach is good enough to dare try 
more than one kind of food. If we happen to 
refuse some foreign dish, it may not mean that it is 
exactly perilous, but that it is of bad taste or is 
prepared with hands which are not clean (I am 
thinking of German culture during the past quarter 
of a century). 

About the benefits of this intellectual exchange 
between us, I can already testify in what concerns 
me, and tell what encouragement, what intense stim- 
ulation I have met in your country, and not only for 
my present task. What enthusiastic confirmation I 
found here, of the value of the works I admired, 
when I compared my standards with those of your 
best young writers. Indeed I cannot yet measure 
all that I owe to those meetings and conversations in 
New York, in Chicago, in Boston, in Princeton, not 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 97 

only for the knowledge gained of your literature, 
but for a better appreciation of my own country's 
art/ 

A last answer to a question which is often asked : 
Wliat is the good of translations? A translation 
never gives the content of the original and is liable 
to pervert and falsify the impression which the 
reader would get if he knew its original language. 
If he cannot obtain the direct influence of the work, 
for lack of knowing the language in which it is 
written, then he had better abstain from any in- 
complete and delusive sgience. 

I am quite willing to agree that definitively a 
translation cannot be equal to an original (although 
it has sometimes proved to be superior). But I 
am obliged to confess that I have received through 
translations stimuli which were exceedingly in- 
tense. The influence of the Russian novelists on 
the whole modem world has exerted itself almost 
exclusively through translations, often through very 
bad ones. The same in the case of Ibsen. The 
translations from the English into French usually 

1 A step in the work of mutual interchange is the organiza- 
tion of systematic sending of the best reviews and books 
published on each side. Another is my translation into French 
of Miss A. Lowell's work on the Tendencies in Modern Ameri- 
can Poetry (American edition published by The Macmillan 
Co.). I also intend to give in France a number of studies on 
contemporary American writers. 



98 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

were good, and the translations of Kipling by L. 
Fabulet and R. d'Humieres, were excellent. The 
French version of the Just So Stories is a little 
masterpiece. 

I wish all young writers indulged in the regular 
practice of translation. It is a wonderful training 
in the use of their own language. I cannot suffi- 
ciently advise my American friends that they take 
the French Looks which they like and feel to be 
nearest to their own spirit, and try to give them 
a form in English. An unexpected communion 
is attained by this exercise, one which is deeper 
than any attained through mere reading. It is 
akin to the pleasure of creation in the company of 
an author you admire. Now what authors shall 
I propose for this task? I shall suggest some in the 
two following chapters. 

Before ending this, I want to say a few words 
about a special and very important form of intellec- 
tual exchange, and that is the educational form. 
A book was recently published which develops 
that matter much better and more completely than 
I could ever do. 

It was issued by the Society of American Fellow- 
ships in French Universities, and is called Science 
and Learning in France,^ It is the work of numer- 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 99 

ous committees of specialists in every branch of 
knowledge, and hundreds of scholars have given 
their name as sponsors, expressing "a cordial de- 
sire to join with the authors in making this book 
a national homage, offered from the universities 
of America to the universities of France." At the 
head of the editorial committee are Professor H. 
Wigmore and Professor Charles H. Grandgent, and 
the preface is written by Professor Charles W. 
Eliot, Emeritus President of Harvard University. 

This book is of great moral significance and 
notable practical value 4o the students. There is a 
remarkablcfstudy on French philosophers, acknowl- 
edging the part of initiator that France played in 
modern times. Twenty-one other matters are sur- 
veyed. About the general qualities of the French 
in matter of science and learning, Professor Eliot 
says: "These characteristics have proved to be 
extraordinarily permanent, abiding generation after 
generation, and surviving immense political and 
social changes. The French scholar is apt to be 
an open-minded man, receptive toward new ideas, 
and an ardent lover of truth, fluent, and progres- 
sive. The French scientists have rarely been ex- 
treme specialists, narrow in their interests and their 
chosen objects. They have recognized that no sci- 

iR. R. Donnelly & Sons, The Lakeside Press, Chicago. 



100 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

ence can be pursued successfully in isolation. . . . 
They have not been subdued by the elaborate sorting 
and compiling machinery of modem scholarship." 
We may infer from this splendid collective work 
that reciprocal influence in education is welcome 
and will know a brilliant future. 

One of the questions I had to abandon, to my 
great regret, is that of the mutual influence of 
French and American philosophies. Indeed such 
matters cannot be dealt with in twenty lines. 
When I translated the works of Professor J. M. 
Baldwin and of Professor Ellwood of Missouri 
University, for the editions of the Societe de Sod- 
ologie, I had a good chance to appreciate the mul- 
tiple points of resemblance in the American and 
French methods of thought, especially in the atti- 
tude of mind in grasping new questions. A con- 
versation I had with Mr. Henri Bergson on that 
subject makes me hope that he will some time de- 
velop this point and that, thanks to him, we shall 
more fully know the deep motives, rooted in tlie 
very process of thought, which make our alliance 
what it is. 

I shall now rapidly review the recent past of 
French literature, insisting on the poetical mani- 
festations, as I am impatient to come to the con- 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 101 

temporary poets who give expression to the soul of 
the young men who are my comrades. But it is 
indispensable to say from who we descend, who are 
our living masters. Another reason for calling 
attention to some important figures of the last 
period is that their value has not yet been fully 
recognized, and American readers will find an 
immense benefit in gleaning by themselves in this 
partly untrodden garden. 

It is difficult to realize how little success is de- 
pendent upon merit, in France less than anywhere 
else. There is a non-rnodest explanation of it in 
the fact that talent being abundant, success could 
only reward it when it was joined with some social 
or commercial cleverness. But a better reason 
than over-abundance of genius is the extreme divi- 
sion of the public in little classes who do not easily 
adopt one another's admirations. So that a man 
known and silently admired by the very best, might 
remain all his life unrecognized except by a few 
hundred people. 

The result and extreme consequence is that for a 
time, the true artists refused to compete for popular- 
ity, and made a system, a doctrine indeed, of their 
isolation. Thus, instead of being recognized after 
their death, like most of the great artists, they be- 
come known only after the passage of one genera- 



102 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

tion of disciples. Now we can perceive rather 
clearly what were the characteristics of the best 
schools of 1890, which are today a part of France's 
classical past. First, they displayed extreme care 
for a perfect, original, rare form. They had con- 
tempt for easy sources of inspiration. They looked 
for an art that not only was entirely sufficient to it- 
self, but that also despised life as ugly and poor. 
Art was a reaction against life and an evasion of 
life — a revenge against it. This is almost exactly 
the principle of Foe, for whom reality was poison, 
and this resulted in the perfectly pure and detached 
work of Mallarme, among others. The result of 
that period was to leave us some admirable poems, 
like "L'Apres-Midi d'un Faune," or Rimbaud's 
"Bateau Ivre." They are still the privilege of very 
few admirers. 

Another result was the conquest of new forms in 
poetry. These poets did not accept the former laws 
of versification; but discovered and adopted new 
ones. And the new exigencies of modern verse are 
perhaps even more strict than the old uniform rules 
of metre and rhyme. Free verse (this name is 
very improper) introduced in poetry many possi- 
bilities and nuances that the regular alexandrine 
verse did not afford. Moreover, irregular verse is 
nothing new, since it is claimed to descend from 



LITERARY INTERCHANGF 103 

La Fontaine and from the verses of the Bible. 
Now poetry is being appreciated according to its 
qualities of lyrism rather than the degree of obe- 
dience to fixed material rules which it mani- 
fests. 

These discussions are much too special for our 
subject. Let us rapidly recall to mind the names of 
Albert Samain, Henri de Regnier, Francis Viele- 
Griffin (who is of American birth), as being the 
initiators of these reforms. Jean Moreas re- 
mained faithful to strict metrical tradition. 

Viele-GrifEn ^ is mostly inspired by Greek an- 
tiquity, but renders it with a power of actual pres- 
ence, of simple and delicate grandeur, which gives 
to his poems the serenity of ever-beautiful work. 

Henri de Regnier ^ is now a member of the 
French Academic, and thus incarnates the recon- 
ciliation of the noblest French tradition and of the 
latest conquests of "modem" poetry. 

Let us then travel to the southern extremity of 
France. At the foot of the Pyrenees, is a sunny 
little town, Orthez. There we find the poet Francis 
Jammes,^ who loves the poor, the animals, the 

iLa Clarte de Vie (Mercure de France), etc. 

2 La Sandale Ailee, Les Medailles d'Argile, Les Jeux 
Rustiques et Divins, etc., and several novels. 

3 De I'angelus de I'auhe a I'angelus du soir, L'Eglise habillee 
de feuilles, Clairidres dans le del, Le Deuil des Primevdres, 



104 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

gardens, the seasons, the young girls and the other 
things of God. He writes about them simple 
poems where the blood of Virgil runs and sings,^ 
Francis Jammes has to be mentioned in the first 
rank of the poets who had influence and were 
continued by disciples. Comtesse Mathieu de 

Le Triomphe de la Vie, Le Roman du LUvre (a book of most 
adorable prose), etc., and recently Le Rosaire au Soleil. 

1 Here is the Prayer to enter Paradise with the Donkeys, 
which I quote from Miss A. Lowell's book, Six French Poets: 

"When the time for going to you will have come, O my God, 
let it be on a day when the countryside is dusty with a festi- 
val. I wish, just as I do here, to choose the road and go 
as I please to Paradise, where there are stars in broad day- 
light. I will take my stick and I will go along the high-road, 
and I will say to the donkeys, my friends: 'I am Francis 
Jammes and I am going to Paradise,' for there is no hell in 
the country of the good God. I will say to them: 'Come, gen- 
tle friends of the blue sky, poor, dear animals, who, with a 
sudden movement of the ears, drive away silver flies, blows, 
and bees. . . .' 

"Grant that I appear before you in the midst of these ani- 
mals that I love so much, because they hang their heads gently, 
and when they stop put their little feet together in a very 
sweet and pitiful way. I shall arrive followed by their mil- 
lions of ears, followed by those who carry baskets on their 
flanks, by those who draw the acrobats' carts, or carts of 
feather-dusters and tinware, by those who have dented cans 
on their backs, she-asses full like gourds, with halting steps, 
and those on whom they put little pantaloons because of the 
blue and running sores which the obstinate flies make, stick- 
ing in circles. My God, grant that I come to you with these 
asses. Grant that angels conduct us in peace to tufted 
streams, where glossy cherries quiver, which are like the 
laughing flesh of young girls, and grant that, leaning over 
your divine waters in this place of souls, I become like the 
donkeys who mirror their humble and gentle poverty in the 
clearness of eternal love." 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 105 

Noailles ^ is another poet, with more pride and 
also more anxiety, but she is near to Jammes, whom 
she deeply admires, in many aspects of her work. 
She is a great, noble, restless soul, with an ex- 
traordinary power of projecting magnificence 
around her. She has ennobled and exalted the 
humble plants from the gardens as well as wor- 
shipped the heroes. She has been criticized for 
this; but I suppose that in order to give grandeur 
to everything one has first to possess an unusual 
amount of grandeur in oneself. She always wrote 
in regular verse, enclosing therein the mystical and 
tragic conflicts which constantly arise in this gen- 
erous and tormented heart. 

A decidedly powerful influence on the present 
French literature is Paul Claudel's. His genius is 
so strong and so new, that a long preparation would 
be necessary to approach and define him. Six 
years ago he was all but unknown. Today he is 
famous. His work is mostly poems and dramas,^ 
wherein a pure catholic orthodoxy is to be found 
together with the most daring audacities in the use 
of the resources of French prosody. 

1 Le Coeur Innombrablc, Les Ehlouissements, Les Vivants et 
les Morts, h Visage EmerveiUe, etc. 

^Cinq Orandes Odes, L'Arbre (dramas), Connaissance de 
VEst (a book of prose on the spectacles of the East, written 
when Claudel was a consul in China), UOtage (a drama), 
etc. — and his Poemes de Guerre. 



106 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

Other important figures in today's poetry are 
Paul Fort, author of the many "Ballades Fran- 
gaises," Andre Suares, who also wrote books of es- 
says and criticism of high value, Andre Spire, 
Henri Gheon, Paul Fargue, Jean Schlumberger, 
each of whom deserves a long appreciation, which 
cannot find place here. But a mere nomenclature 
of the influences acting upon us could not omit their 
names. 

Charles Peguy ^ has a place among the poets, 
owing to his "Mysteres," the first one being a deeply 
beautiful restitution of Joan of Arc's childhood and 
vocation. 

The two masters whose action I regard as most 
decisive on the inspiration and work of the young 
are Andre Gide and Emile Verhaeren. Of the first 
I shall say nothing in this article, because I can- 
not resign myself to limit his definition to a few 
sentences, and because his tremendous influence on 
the artists whom I know has been so multiform, so 
subtle, that it would be a vain and poor attempt 
to try to detect it in a rapid analysis. All that I 
can say is that I owe everything to him.^ 

1 See Part I. 

^Les Nourritures Terrestres, La Porte Etroite, PrHextes, 
Nouveaux PrStextes, etc. Readers who wish to know hira 
better have to open, first, his works, second, Jacques Riviere's 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 107 

At the Rouen railway station, in November, 1916, 
Emile Verhaeren was killed beneath the wheels of 
a passing train. The greatest of Belgian poets, and 
one of the most noble workers in the French lan- 
guage was taken from us. But if there is a man 
who should dwell permanently among us, living 
more and more in his work and example, it is Emile 
Verhaeren. 

Alive, who was his superior? Hot blood circu- 
lated in his veins, his thought was a glowing cru- 
cible, in which matters were submitted to a fiery 
test. His voice rapped out words that, with a 
gesture, he seemed to fling into space. He tramped 
forward, shoulders rounded, like the abutment of 
an arch, as one ready to push forward something 
heavy. His physical appearance inspired more 
than one artist, and the best portraits of him that re- 
main are without doubt those drawn by his friend 
and compatriot, Theo Van Rysselberghe. The face 
seamed, wrinkled, and grief worn, but the eyes 
clear and bright; the moustache long and drooping; 
the hand hot and nervous, seeming always ready to 
seize an object and to remodel it. His speech was 
simple and cordial, and even enthusiastic, and his 
heart was infinitely youthful. If one speaks of the 

EPvbdes, which contain the best survey of his genius and pro- 
duction. 



108 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

presence of mind of certain men, it is necessary in 
the case of Verhaeren to speak of the presence of 
heart. 

His supreme title to fame will rest in his having 
welded at the heat of that red forge, his heart, the 
lyricism of great poetic inspiration and the reality 
of modem life. He carried with him a love of 
reality, and he turned aside from nothing. The 
real commenced with his own body, with the physi- 
cal joy of recognizing the world through his 
senses. 

I love my eyes, my arms, 

My hands, my flesh, my frame, 

And my hair thick and fair, 

And with my lungs, 

I wish to drink in all space, 

In order to swell m-y strength. 

This he writes in the fulness of life, and later — 

I thank you, my body, 
For being still firm and quick 
To the touch of the swift winds, 
Or of the low breezes. 

And you, my straight frame, 
And my strong lungs. 
Breathing by the seashore, 
Or on the mountain, 
The keen and radiant air 
Which enwraps the world. 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 109 

Impelled by such elements of fervour, the poet 
could scarcely go astray, whatever might be the 
parabola described by his spirit. He possessed 
the true light which was never lacking, and which 
did not deceive. 

"Instinct rivets to my brow a sufficient cer- 
tainty." 

Verhaeren took up the task of the artist as the 
result of a supreme election. It was to this higher 
form of life that he devoted himself. He listened 
to the temptation irresistible to a high spirit. 

"Mark the deep rhythms of the Universe ! 
Oh! to define progress in a passing image, 
In a sudden language; 
To note it in the rough seas. 
Upon the mountain height, 
In the rage of the wind. 
In the clash of thunder 
In the softness of a woman's footfall. 
In the light of the eyes, 
In the pity of the hands. 
In the manifest uprising 
Of a super-human being. 
In the tempest of sex, 
In the hours of folly, 
In all that deceives. 
In all that hears, 
In all that disrupts. 
In all that unites 
To captivate the infinite intelligence." 



110 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

And when he translates the powerful joy of 
workmanship, how full are these words to the 
artist! 

The bones, the blood, the nerves 

Make alliance 

With one knows not what trembling 

In the air and in the wind. 

One feels light and bright as space, 

One rejoices to give thanks. 

Facts, principles, laws — 
One comprehends all. 
The heart trembles with love, 
And the spirit seems mad 
With the intoxication of ideas! 

That which Verhaeren manifests before all is 
a simple and yet fervent virility. Nobody can be 
gentler or at times rougher, more brutal or more 
tender in turn. He is the great wind which both 
ravages and caresses. He is the pure voice of na- 
ture, complex and alarming. Above all, his work 
weighs. His most largely winged verses are al- 
ways cut from hard metal, and those most charged 
with divine spirit are in solid blocks, four-sided, 
like the masonry of a cathedral which cannot be 
destroyed by cannon. 

The general effect of his work is ample and gen- 
erous. The heart of the poet traverses and ex- 
presses the most tragic crises. Strenuous conflicts, 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 111 

and stormy images torment the soul and suspend it 
in space. All problems of universal or of indi- 
vidual ethics are found agitating in the poems of 
Verhaeren. No one is more deeply enrooted in the 
life of his time, and I do not believe that a person 
exists who has more completely expressed the mean- 
ing of life, its labours, its despairs, its pride, and its 
"multiple splendour." 

His works are far from unknown in America, 
where various translations are in circulation, 
thanks to Arthur Symons, Jethro Bithell, Alma 
Strettel, Joyce Kilmer and others. 

The gloiy of Verhaeren was essentially interna- 
tional. His popularity was perhaps greatest in 
Russia. Thousands of readers, and especially 
young men, have vibrated to his thrilling strophes, 
to the unbridled work of his youth. ("Les 
Flamandes," "Les Moines," "Les Flambeaux 
Noirs.") 

"Les Villes Tentaculaires" tell of the devouring 
intensity of the industrial forges and factories, and 
the drama of the deserted countryside. 

"Les Visages de la Vie" (1899), "La Multiple 
Splendeur" (1902), "Les Forces Tumulteuses," 
(1906), "Les Rythmes Souverains" (1910) mark 
his most characteristic epochs, if not the apogee of 
his power, and in his late years this power was not 
diminished but softened. 



112 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

He gives another expression of himself in poems 
of tenderness and serenity, as in "Les Heures de 
Soir," "Bles Mouvants," in poems dedicated to 
heroic memories, as in the description of his 
Fatherland — "Toute la Flandre." Between these 
appear the dramas — "Philippe II," "Le Cloitre," 
"Les Aubes," and "Helen of Sparta," which was 
produced magnificently in Paris in 1912. 

The basis of his ethic is admiration. Little by 
little in the course of his work other forces dissolve 
or mingle as streams which join a river. His re- 
volts are gradually absorbed by tlie love which dom- 
inates, simply because with Verhaeren, in whom 
so many forces operated, love was the strongest. 

"He who may read me in the days to come, 

• •••••• 

May he know my transports and my joy 
Amid cries, revolts and tears, 
See me rush into combat, proud and manly, 
Free from sorrow and attracting love, 
As one conquers one's prey. 

He foresaw clearly, the times and the passions to 
come, and presented them with all his genius, fore- 
telling their approach in a strophe which is perhaps 
of all the most beautiful. 

A vast hope springs from the unknown, 
Displacing the ancient balance 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 113 

Of which our souls are weary 
Nature makes ready to engrave 
A new visage for eternity. 
Everything stirs and it seems 
That the horizon moves forward. 

Of his life work the synthesis was complete, the 
harmony without reproach, and this great and gen- 
erous power for years satisfied himself merely 
with kindness and goodness. As he had led "a 
life having nothing in common with death," ^ 
neither present bitterness nor the ashes of a past 
sorrow could extinguish his pure flame. 

His life was divided between the little house at 
St. Cloud, near Paris, and his retreat at Caillou-qui- 
Bique, in Belgium, where he passed the summer. 

And then the inexpiable thing happened. 

August, 1914, raining blood and disaster, burst 
on his loyal and pacific little country. The incen- 
diary, the assassin, the violator struck it down. 
The unbridled brutality of an invader who already 
believed himself victorious was let loose upon his 
beloved country. Verhaeren was advancing in 
years, and the blow was terrible. He suffered pro- 
foundly in spirit and body, and was almost suc- 
cumbing to the sorrow which filled his soul at the 
sight of the devastation of all that he cherished. 

1 Vildrac. 



114 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

Nevertheless, the energy which burned in his be- 
ing kept him erect, and the peaceable man of letters 
became a combatant. All that was his of fervour, 
of indignation, and also of simple devotion he 
placed at the service of his murdered yet always 
living country. He saw the burned cities, he saw 
the army pent in the last field of its natal soil. He 
saw the King amid his soldiers, and he wrote pas- 
sionately of these sombre things. 

"La Belgique Sanglante!" — Emile Verhaeren, 
after all his works of love, emitted this great cry of 
anger. This book is from the outset a loyal and 
irrefutable document. When many other pam- 
phlets are forgotten, it will remain as a redoubtable 
instrument and a powerful manifestation of resist- 
ance and of faith. 

In the midst of many statements of facts he does 
not fail to make allusion and render homage to the 
generosity of America. Between him and that 
country a pronounced comprehension existed, which 
had not to wait for the splendid enthusiasm and 
generosity of the United States towards his mar- 
tyred nation. Like his compatriot Emile Vander- 
velde, and also Dr. Depage, Emile Verhaeren was 
a firm believer in democracy. At the same time 
he was a personal friend of King Albert, and in 
this friendship between king and poet, between 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 115 

public man and man of science, one may ask who 
was the more ennobled? I think it was Belgium 
herself. 

Presently appeared The Red Wings of War, that 
book of poems written during the sanguinary tor- 
ment of Belgium. It is not equal to the Ver- 
haeren of the years of happiness, fervour and for- 
tune, but such pieces as "The Country to its Dead 
Soldiers" and "A Strip of Country" are supreme 
in their alliance of anger with tenderness. Never- 
theless, one fact makes us inconsolable. Great 
patriot that he was, he will not assist in the deliver- 
ance of his people and will not see in Brussels re- 
stored the King re-enter on horse-back, amid the 
fervent greetings of a resuscitated nation — the King 
sans peur, of whom Verhaeren's last book sang. 

Comes that day of glory when the soldiers of 
Albert I, laughing yet terrible, shall re-enter Dix- 
mude, Bruges, Liege and also the little village of 
Caillou-qui-Bique, 

Verhaeren is dead . . • 

What will be, in the time to come, the influence 
of Verhaeren and his work? I believe that it will 
increase and be immense. This fine and yet prim- 
itive soul will exercise a powerful influence upon 
the spirits of the approaching epoch. The war- 



116 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

riors on their return will require nourishment, 
healthful and sustaining, and the influence of Ver- 
haeren is that above all, apart from his na'ive lu- 
cidity. He warns us that "one must love, in order 
to understand with genius." 

One has often compared the inspiration of Ver- 
haeren with that of Walt Whitman, and in many re- 
spects their characters resemble each other. It is 
to Hugo also that he belongs, in certain excesses 
even, that is to say, his indulgence in flamboyant 
imagery, his striking contrasts and grandiloquent 
epithets are the natural excesses of an almost too 
generous soul. His faults even are an aspect of his 
grandeur. 

In truth, I believe that the time will come when 
the works of Verhaeren will be regarded with the 
highest entliusiasm, and indeed that time is already 
at hand. 

French literature of today shows the marks of 
one American influence which may well be called 
decisive. Walt Whitman's blood runs in the veins 
of the young writers of France, and was infused 
there through more than one channel. We first 
knew "Leaves of Grass," thanks to the translation 
by Leon Bazalgette, which was published by the 
Mercure de France, riien we read it in English. 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 117 

Shall I call our young poets disciples of his? 
Whitman would smile at this. The old master 
whom they never saw but can imagine, never cared 
for disciples in the narrow sense of that word. 
Maybe they know little of him, and understand him 
wrong — still not wrong enough to call themselves 
his disciples! Some writers of ours used a verse 
very similar to his. But his influence on a few 
poets is small, compared to his action on the men- 
tality of the young in general. It is more vital 
than the discovery of a new resource in rhythm or 
in melody. It is an immensely renewed inspira- 
tion which is proposed by this American, and which 
is one of the treasures of our times. 

He and Verhaeren, our masters, are, indeed, like 
some proud and gigantic stems, whence we, their 
branches, may borrow a stimulating sap. I remem- 
ber the word of Alphonse Daudet's little son when 
he saw Ivan Turgeniev coming into his father's 
house, arm in arm with Gustave Flaubert: "But 
all your friends are giants, then?" 

These giants who dictate the rhythm of our liter- 
ary life have opened to the world's poetry a new 
field, and what a field ! — that of modern life. They 
sang of the cities, of industrial work, and physical 
eff*ort. Their teaching is the one which will be de- 
manded by the men returned from the war: a teach- 



118 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

ing of strength, fervor and simplicity*. But we did 
not wait for the war to read and admire them. 

The universe seems to be wider since their 
voices praised its various parts, countries, crea- 
tures, emotions, constructions, details. . . . We 
are no more the men we were before we read "Song 
of Myself." 

Let me quote, almost in full, one of the best 
poems of Charles Vildrac's Livre d' Amour} Do 
I mistake in regarding this as affiliated to your con- 
temporary inspiration, either still latent or coming 
to expression? 

The Conquerors 

Behold the cavaher without a horse, — ^but whoever 
sees him pass will know him for a Knight. 

Behold the pilgrim with neither staff nor breviary, 
— ^but whoever sees him pass will know that he is more 
than a crusader. 

Behold the chief who does not command, but whoever 
listens to him will know him for a captain. 

Behold the conqueror without an army, — but the only 
conqueror — he who knows how to talk with everybody, 
both men and women; and can make good tears shine 
in their eyes again, and can give back to them the clear 
laughter of children. 

1 Nouvelle Revue Franqaise, publisher. Translation by Miss 
E. Eyre. 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 119 

His best weapons are his friendly eyes, his thought- 
ful and surprising kindnesses, — it is the way his voice 
gives help to his words, it is the way his spirit dances 
like a torch. 

He is prodigal and bare as a tree in the spring, his 
heart is warm as a greenhouse in winter; and one aban- 
dons oneself to whatever he says, — again it is he who, 
when he takes, gives. 

He will come wherever you are. He will not sit 
down beside you as do those to whom the half of your 
face and but one of your shoulders suffice. 

But he will sit down opposite you, his knees touch- 
ing your knees, your hands within reach of his hands, 
and his eyes bearing upon your eyes, forcing them to 
uncover. 

And you will say: Where have I seen him before? 

As in singing under a vault one discovers the single 
note which makes the whole vibrate and become its 
warm voice. 

So his words agitate in your lifted throat the beautiful 
voice that it imprisons, of which you had not suspicion, 
— your best voice, your only voice. 

He will love you in your own way, with the presents 
you would have chosen, with his bluntness, with his 
laughter, his humility or his pity; he will love you as 
much as it is necessary to soften you and win you. 

You will wonder: What does he expect from me? 
What will he ask of me tomorrow? And you will be 
troubled, never suspecting that really, without know- 
ing it himself, he expects from you the reason for his 
existence; that you are necessary to him as the words 
one speaks, the ears that receive them, as beautiful 
things to the eyes that surround them. 



120 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

For conquest is his great desire; like heroes and like 
women, he loves to feel himself fondled by the scat- 
tered thoughts of men, which, from a great distance, 
lean towards him as benumbed fingers stretch towards a 
fire. 

On certain nights, his hands, pressing together, are 
warm the while he gently inclines his head, for he is 
aware, confusedly, that his name has just been spoken 
in many dwellings where he has been. 

Houses close to him, and houses remote from him, 
resembling each other in nothing but in his love as a bap- 
tism. So you will be one of his victories, followed by 
another and still others. 

The strength of his heart will bend towards him the 
proud and contemptuous people, as it will enfold those 
that are weak. 

It is not the custom among men to consecrate oneself 
and give, expecting nothing in return ; and to balance his 
great love it is the love of many that he demands. . . . 

Into a land of little hope, under an aged sun that 
long had looked serene on men both gay and sad, there 
came, one day, this conqueror, in fire for keen and vivid 
conquering. Indefatigable he makes his way, tracing 
his path before his steps as one would plough. 

And the vagrants that he passed, loved him dumbly 
like dogs. 

And with an awkward and simple tenderness the sim- 
ple villages loved him. 

And in their crowded waves, their voices thick with 
tears and their clamours rising in vast clouds, and their 
enormous and childish joy, the feverish and pallid cities 
loved him. 

Until one day, delicious miracle! another is born, 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 121 

endowed as he, another arises, jealous of his renown, 
and marches like him through the country — prodigal of 
the best in him, and reaping, reaping victories. 

And then will other conquerors unexpectedly arise, 
and as there have been a hundred conquerors, so now 
must one become a hundred times a lover, a hundred 
times beloved. 

. . . And those that have been conquered a hundred 
times will also wish to conquer. 

And the time will come in the country, the time of the 
great conquest, when people with this longing will leave 
the thresholds of their doors, to go the one to meet the 
other. 

And the time will come in this country, when history 
will be made of nothing but choruses of songs, but 
dances hand in hand, but ohe combat and one victory! 

Vildrac belongs to the group of the Unanimists, 
whose chief was Jules Romains. In Romains' La 
Vie Unanime,^ we find the verses which perhaps 
formulate most absolutely this new creed. They 
looked for inspiration not so much in individual 
feelings or passions, as in the life and movements 
of collectivities. Whether this school will con- 
tinue to exist as a group I do not know. But I have 
a great faith in the works that will come from some 
of its members. 

The very movement and sound of Whitman are 
to be found in some of Valery Larbaud's poems, 
preceding his "Bamabooth's Diary." And may I 

1 Mercure de France, publisher. 



122 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

quote this fragment of an unpublished chant "To 
America," which was written in 1917 by a very 
young poet, Mireille Havet? 

"Glorious cities of America, 

Tumultuous cities, and well populated, 

Cities rich with the future which will cover us all, 

I salute you, today, from my little corner in France, 

From my corner of a city in France, 

From the corner of my table. 

• ••■•••• 

"Ah, never was it graver to be young. 

Graver to be impatient, 

With that conquering desire, which comes from the pride 
to be the last ones 

. . . The last of all, when the others were living, 

. . . The first, now that we are alone! 

And the words shall come from us 

Or eternally remain silent, 

And judgment shall come from us, and action. 

Or our cities will remain in ashes, and our dead non- 
buried ! 

• ••••••• 

"We find ourselves at the edge of the fresh ridge; 
The seed that we hold is very different. 

"America, let our generation be the piers of a bridge 

Stretching itself between the various nations. 

Let our hands grasp each other. 

Let us stand firm 

And be worthy of this Earth, which men, until now. 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 123 

Did but divide between themselves in a bloody fashion. 
"I salute you, well-populated cities of America, 
And my heart goes to you 
Leaping with hope." 

There are many names, which I would give: 
Rene Arcos, Georges Duhamel, Frangois Porche 
and many others. But let me once more turn back 
to Henri Franck, who would lead our troop today 
were he still among us.^ The first part of his Danse 
devant VArche ended with this affirmation of en- 
thusiasm for the Universe: 

"Adolescent runner, with unwearied heart, 
I shall reach the clearing where one comes upon God. 
One day I shall know the thing I so strongly desire, 
And my spirit will be multiplied and stretched with the 

waiting ; 
For nothing exists in earth or heaven 
That the determination of my seeking wisdom may not 

know. 
One day I shall find the divine current. 
And with the feel of its powerful flow against my back, 
A joyous bather abandoning myself to the sweep of the 

stream, 
On this glorious bed, between the superb banks of the 

Universe laden with houses and fruits. 
Supple of body, light of heart, swift of spirit. 
In the turbulent water of life I shall swim with power 

and pleasure." 

iSee Part I. 



124 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

And in the last part, reaching a higher point of 
knowledge and wisdom, without losing his power 
of fervour, but having transformed its object: 

"Truth is enthusiasm without hope, 

Ardour unquenchable, 

Joy that mounts straight up into the black sky, 

The perfect happiness of fervour without recompense, 

The high happiness of feeling keenly one's existence, 

Of being alive!" 

The fragments I have chosen to quote are not 
the most perfect that I could have found, but the 
ones which seemed to me to give the sense of our 
next tendencies in poetry; its characteristics being 
the universal, the direct, and, as so, essentially able 
to be exchanged from country to country = And I 
find much of the same characteristics in the living 
American poets whom I happened to read. There 
is no reason why France should not give a cordial 
recognition to poets like Edgar Lee Masters, E. A. 
Robinson, Amy Lowell, Vachel Lindsay, Witter 
Bynner, Ridgely Torrence, James Oppenheim, 
Louis Ledoux, and others. The more genuinely 
American will be the more welcome, since American 
attitude of mind now means that broad and 
understanding sympathy that we are looking for 
in our own best leaders. I am strangely impa- 
tient to see the day when I shall try to give to a few 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 125 

in Paris an idea of the movement and rhythm of 
"The Congo" or "General Booth" by Vachel Lind- 
say. Lindsay's muse essentially belongs to Spring- 
field, Illinois, and knows no other shores, but that 
is precisely why we shall be glad to welcome her, 
with her bright cheeks and well-knit muscles, and 
her surprise to find herself among us. This is no 
mere curiosity or dilettantism. What we really 
love will become a part of ourselves, as Poe and 
Whitman did in the past. 

In the literary life of France, during the past few 
years, there was not to be found the strict division 
and classification in schools and "chapelles" which 
the former period had known. The writers might 
be classified according to the reviews in which 
they used to have their works published, but the 
tendency of each review was much less definite than 
before, and many writers contributed to several 
of them. It often happens that a group which is 
politically conservative, proves to be over-advanced 
in its literary form of expression; like, for in- 
stance, the Occident magazine, which holds to 
catholic tradition and which publishes works whose 
form a defender of classical rules would call rev- 
olutionary. 

Most of the best books published in the past fif- 



126 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

teen years appeared in the Mercure de France edi- 
tions, and the collection of the Mercure magazine 
itself can be regarded as forming the best history of 
recent French literature. Other periodicals which 
played a large part in its evolution were La Revue 
Blanche, UErmitage, La Phalange, Vers et Prose 
(edited by Paul Fort). Charles Peguy's Cahiers 
de la Quinzaine also contain much of our best 
production. 

In 1909, La Nouvelle Revue Francaise was 
started and soon gathered most of what was living 
and valuable in the various tendencies of contem- 
porary writing. Two years later it opened a pub- 
lishing branch, now very successful, and in 1913 
its spirit was brought into the Theatre du Vieux- 
Colombier, founded by Jacques Copeau. The war 
stopped all these activities, except as to the publish- 
ing of books. But in 1917-1918 the Theatre du 
Vieux-Colombier will be transported to New York, 
and this will bring one more opportunity of under- 
standing and penetration between the advanced 
literary elements of both countries. 

There are many other active groups, which I 
could enumerate, did this book pretend to give a 
complete account of our intellectual life. But my 
purpose was only to suggest and awaken interest. 
The Americans who desire to know more about us 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 127 

will have no difficulty in discovering that I have 
treated a very small part of my subject. But I can 
introduce them to other guides and to better ones. 
They are the essayists and critics who gave intel- 
ligent and passionate commentaries on that life 
of ours. On your way to France, read the books 
of Andre Snares/ Remy de Gourmont's Prome- 
nades Litteraires, Andre Gide's Pretextes and 
Nouveaux Pretextes, and Jacques Riviere's Etudes, 
which are on the border where criticism meets 
poetry herself. 

For those who are interested in the questions of 
poetical technique, I think that with Nos Directions, 
by H. Gheon, the little book by Vildrac and Du- 
hamel ^ would be of great profit. It shows what 
the young men of that group regard as important in 
the form, according to their present standards. 



War has not proven, of course, to be creative of 
beautiful works of art. The four poets whom I 
shall name as having written the most remarkable 
songs during that dark period did but apply to a 
new subject a lyrism and a form which they al- 

1 Sur la Vie, Essais, Portraits, Trois Hommes (Pascal, 
Ibsen, Dostoievsky), etc. 
i Notes sur la Technique poStique (Figuiere, Paris). 



128 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

ready possessed. About the war itself, I expect 
the only valuable and great works will appear much 
later on. The Iliad was not composed under the 
walls of Troy besieged. 

Shortly before Emile Verhaeren's death, in the 
autumn of 1916, the Mercure de France published 
his book of poems: Les Ailes Rouges de la Guerre. 
Mr. Joyce Kilmer translated "Cathedral," ^ which 
is among the strongest things in the volume. I 
quote from it: 

He who walks through the meadows of Champagne 

At noon in Fall, when leaves like gold appear, 

Sees it draw near 
Like some great mountain set upon the plain, 
From radiant dawn until the close of day, 

Nearer it grows 

To him who goes 
Across the country. When tall towers lay 

Their shadowy pall 

Upon his way, 

He enters, where 
The solid stone is hollowed deep by all 
Its centuries of beauty and of prayer. 

• «•.*••• 

At once, they set their cannon in its way. 

There is no gable now, nor wall 
That does not suffer, night and day, 

As shot and shell in crushing torrents fall. 

1 It appeared in Mr. Kilmer's recent book. Main Street and 
Other Poems (Doran, New York). We quote it with the kind 
permission of the author and publisher. 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 129 

The stricken tocsin quivers through the tower; 

The triple nave, the aspe, the lonely choir 
Are circled, hour by hour, 

With thundering bands of fire 
And Death is scattered broadcast among men. 
And then 

That which was splendid with baptismal grace; 
The stately arches soaring into space. 
The transepts, columns, windows grey and gold, 
The organ, in whose tones the ocean rolled. 
The crypts, of mighty shades the dwelling places, 
The Virgin's gentle hands, the Saints' pure faces, 
All, even the pardoning hands of Christ the Lord, 
Were struck and broken by the wanton sword 
Of sacrilegious lust. 

beauty slain, glory in the dust! 

Strong walls of faith, most basely overthrown! 

The crawling flames, like adders glistening, 

Ate the white fabric of this lovely thing. 

Now from its soul arose a piteous moan, 

The soul that always loved the just and fair. 

Granite and marble loud their woe confessed. 

The silver monstrances that Popes had blessed, 

The chalices and lamps and crosiers rare 

Were seared and twisted by a flaming breath; 

The horror everywhere did range and swell. 

The guardian Saints into this furnace fell. 

Their bitter tears and screams were stilled in death. 

Around the flames armed hosts are skirmishing, 
The burning sun reflects the lurid scene; 
The German army, fighting for its life. 
Rallies its torn and terrified left wing; 



130 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

And, as they near this place 

The imperial eagles see 

Before them in their flight, 
Here, in the solemn night, 
The old cathedral, to the years to he 

Showing, with wounded arms, their own disgrace. 

Paul Claudel first published Trois Poemes de 
guerre, and later Autres Poemes durant la guerre. 
The former have become well known, especially the 
first of them: "Tant que vous voudrez, mon 
general," which seems to embody the j&ghting spirit 
and the desire for sacrifice of the man in the 
trench. 

Frangois Porche also published two small books : 
U Arret sur la Marne and Le Poeme de la Tranchee. 
The former relates to the breaking out of the war, 
the German attack, and the retreat until the critical 
moment when the French armies were ordered to 
stop the victorious invader — which they did. Here 
is that moment, told as a marvellous story for chil- 
dren to come: 

"There was once a grandfather 
With white hair and blue eyes 
A big sly companion 
Who well concealed his play, 
Who, clinching hard his jaw 
As would an old wild boar, 
Chose his observatory 
At the foot of a poplar. 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 131 

"Had fifteen hundred thousand 
Grandchildren in his sleeve 
All good and living hammers 
And he being the handle. 
He gathered in his hands 
All the rivers and ways 
Which cross and cut each other 
From the Meuse to the Oise. 

• •*••• 

"The front was flowing back 
As an enormous tide 
— France is falling to pieces! 
The world stood terrified. 
Suddenly he beckons; 
In a sublime effort 
The immense heavy line 
Stops, and faces the North. 

"It is dawn, Genevieve ^ 
Is leading the white herd 
Of the mists which arise. 
Joan is near the flag 
Swinging her oriflam 
Marked with fleur de lis. 
The East is red with flames. 
Joffre says: Go, my sons!" 

The book of poems called Foi en la France 
was written by Henri Gheon, during his service at 
the front as a physician of the artillery. Some 
poems are hot with action. Others, which he calls 
"discours lyriques," contain the following passages : 

1 Sainte Genevieve, guardian saint of Paris. 



132 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

All France 
(For the men who belong to a party) 

"The whole of you, with your faults; for you are not 
a word, a myth, a dream; and you are no longer a God, 
in spite of our devotion. 

"Yes, the fragility of the creature — and its force. A 
human being, with a body, a face, and eyes: it is thus 
that I wish to see you — and easily recognizable by every 
one. 

"With a long life behind you — and there is every- 
thing in a life! But in yours, France, already so many 
beautiful sleeping centuries . . . 

"With a long life yet before you — for you have kept 
your youth . . . 

. . . "And of what you have been, nothing to deny! 
And nothing of what you will be, generous one! 

"Salute, face misted with tears, pure forehead marked 
with agonies, look of faults, look of faith, mouth of 
grief, mouth of joy. human face! 

"Salute, fallible heart, splendid heart, woman with the 
large cloak where our discords used to warm each other, 
and where our discords will unite. 

"Salute, earth of errors, earth of glory! Prudent 
economist who weighs the bread and the salt, improvi- 
dent hand which opens the closet to the beggar! 

"Salute, gentle one! Salute, rebel! Salute, saint! 
Salute, warrior! Salute, enigma of destiny, phantom 
friend! . . . 

"Now, reassembled in your sons, behold you in front 
of them, like a mother! And all read in your suffering 
what all before had not understood." 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 133 

This is "On the Great Russian Retreat". 

"What do I know of you, profound Russia, perpetual 
retreat of immense and level horizons — of wheat, of 
swamps and of snow; silver laughter of sounding birch- 
trees in the heart of white nights, stammering of the mou- 
jicks in the golden chapels? 

"What do I know of you, profound Russia? Never 
have I approached you but in spirit — only followed my 
heart, dreaming of attaining to the poet in the echo of 
the translated words . . . but even the echo was splen- 
did! The human metal resounded there, and one could 
not be mistaken. 



"What do I know of you, profound Russia, and yet I 
press on in your suite as a poet in Ukraine with his little 
instrument — two strings upon a sounding board — as far 
as destiny wishes to lead you, upon the road of your 
calvary. . . . 

"A few notes, always the same; hardly a song, but 
everything is said: Your distress of ancient times and 
which will surpass our times, your tireless plaint, nour- 
ished by itself, and to which God will surrender." 



Can we now gaze into the future? 

There is no possible comparison with other 
epochs. All currents are combining and crossing 
each other, all tendencies have a chance to find their 
way. Owing to the wide possibilities of interna- 
tional communication and translation, and to the 
world-influences which are resulting from it, think- 



134 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

ers and artists will dedicate their work, more and 
more, to the remote and unknown admirers who are 
waiting for them all over the earth, rather than to a 
limited surrounding due to mere circumstances. 
This promises a freer expansion of sincerity, a 
lesser submission to local limitations. It is a pow- 
erful source of strength and stimulation to create, 
to feel that spontaneous, invisible communion which 
circulates now between young men of all countries. 
It is as if the world, at the issue of this war, would 
start from a common point and live on with common 
terms. 

Are we to see a long period of barren incertitude, 
during the time of reconstruction, and will all ener- 
gies be devoted to material work? What I am in- 
clined to believe is that material enterprise itself 
will be transformed in its spirit, and might prove 
as inspiring as any other thing involving energy 
and passion. I see an infinite broadening of the 
artist's domain ; the way has already been shown by 
those whom I called our prophets. And I see a 
growing and more spontaneous interpenetration of 
science, ethics and art, working combined in the 
mind of new men. I suppose that literary work 
will resume its normal, logical development, start- 
ing at the point where it had stopped in July, 1914. 
But the men having grown different, a deep revolu- 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 135 

tion will be felt to have taken place within every 
particular work. 

For these past three years, art and literature were 
paralyzed. But there will be some triumphant 
awakening. After the strain of disciplined solidar- 
ity, a tremendous reaction of free expression will 
break out, just as a reaction of liberalism will suc- 
ceed the temporary prussianization" which the 
young men voluntarily support. This does not 
mean anarchy, on the contrary.^ I think that after 
man's destructive power, man's power of creation 
will reach to an extent in which but few believe 
today. 



Never was interest in music more developed in 
France than during the few years which preceded 
the war. This came after a long period of stag- 
nation in public taste, when no other ahemative 
existed but academic poverty or hysterico-fashion- 
able enthusiasms for "virtuosi" who usurped the 
place of the work they were supposed to serve. No 
art had been more abandoned. None has been 
more ardently reviving. Minds of all sorts, turned 
toward interests of all kinds, now unite in their love 
for music. Men of science, of letters, of tradition 

iSee P6guy's last lines in Part I. 



136 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

and of revolution, join in that common worship. 
Moreover, the great musicians of today are men of 
wide culture who live with the elite of their time. 
Thus, writing and criticism about music has been 
able to give us the books of Romain Rolland, of 
Riviere, of Suares and this book of G. Jean-Aubry,^ 
which is to be recommended to any one who wants 
a complete and intelligent commentary on the pres- 
ent musical treasure of France. Together with the 
new musical activity there was a new comprehen- 
sion of the past, namely, of French music from the 
16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. 

For a long time, it had been believed that French 
composers were only capable of small, graceful, 
light constructions. "Are we going at last to under- 
stand," says Jean-Aubry, "the true grandeur and 
universal value of a period which saw Vincent 
d'lndy's symphonic work, Debussy's orchestral 
compositions, Roussel's 'Evocations,' Florent 
Schmitt's Psalm and Quintette, Ravel's 'Daphnis et 
Chloe,' Roger Ducasse's 'Suite FranQaise,' and 
which has given to the theatre 'Pelleas et Meli- 
sande,' 'Ariane et Barbe-Bleue,' and 'Penelope'?" 

There also foreign influences had brought stimu- 
lating and encouraging example. One country 

1 "La Musique fran^aise d'aujourd'hui." (Perrin, pub- 
lisher, Paris.) 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 137 

was, above all, showing the way: it was Russia. 
Spain was giving, parallel to ours, a splendid gener- 
ation of young composers ; one of them was Grana- 
dos, killed in the torpedoing of the Sussex. From 
Germany we had had the gigantic influence of 
Wagner, which had known its climax some twenty 

years ago. 

Some of our masters— G. Faure, V. d'Indy, after 
great Cesar Franck, and Saint-Saens, are widely 
known already. The works of other elders, Cha- 
brier, Chausson, Duparc, Magnard (who was killed 
in 1914 in defending his own house against the 
invaders), have not yet known all the recognition 
which time will accord to their names. 

The greatest living figure in French music, 
Claude Debussy, is also most representative of 
French genius. He is sensuous, delicate, intelli- 
gent, refined above all, and he conceals his actual 
greatness and might under his qualities of grace and 
reserve, instead of making a tumultuous and 
colossal display of them. In age and sources of in- 
spiration Debussy belongs to the "Symbolist" 
period and, as a fact, he chose his friends, when a 
young man, among that group which included 
Maeterlinck, Louys, Regnier, Mallarme, Gide. 
But by his production he decidedly is a precursor 
and a master of our present tendencies. He 



138 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

worked with the terminating XlXth century, but 
his work was addressed to the 20th century. His 
career is a noble example of dignity and aloof- 
ness from easy and clamorous success. But now 
his importance is as widely acknowledged as at 
first it had been denied. Not only is "Pelleas" an 
original and pure masterpiece, not only is the 
"Prelude a I'Apres-Midi d'un Faune" a rarity, 
but Debussy's influence covers all the present epoch 
and is to be felt in the work of most contemporary 
composers.^ 

Other masters are Paul Dukas, the author of 
^'Ariane et Barbe-Bleue' and of ''L'Apprenti 
Sorcier," and his work is solid, serene, healthy. 
Maurice Ravel, whose clear, ironical, ingenious in- 
spiration gives him a place which is apart. His 
"Sonatine," his "Pavane pour une infante defunte" 
and the suite of "Ma mere I'Oye" (Mother Goose) 
are now famous. Florent Schmitt, who composed 
a tragedy of "Salome," a Quintette, a Psalm, and 
many other works of serious, sensible and skilful 
character. Deodat de Severac, who comes from 
Southern France and whose work is devoted to the 
aspects of nature, of which they give a large, al- 

1 other principal works of Debussy are : La Mer, the Noc- 
turnes, the pieces written on Verlaine's, Baudelaire's and 
Pierre Louys' poems, and his famous pieces for the piano. 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 139 

most vegetally powerful interpretation. Erik 
Satie, a humourist and also a clever technician, who 
had an intuition of the new tendencies in music 
perhaps before Debussy himself. 

According to the high standards of musical art in 
America, it may be expected that the works of these 
composers will be executed more and more in this 
country; French music was usually represented by 
the less significant light operas when Italian and 
German music was known through masterpieces. 
Which is unfair, but of course it was our own fault, 
since we ourselves ignored for a long time what 
riches were ours. Since last year, a great step has 
been made by the sending of some remarkable in- 
terpreters from Paris to this countr\-, like Casadesus 
and his "ancient instruments," Joseph Bonnet, the 
organist, Pierre Monteux, who directed the orches- 
tra in the Metropolitan Opera-house, Mrs. Gills, and 
others. Carlos Salzedo for the last tvvo vears has 
been fighting for the cause of French modem music 
w^ith his excellent "Trio de Lutece.'' E. Varese 
directed a performance of Berlioz' Requiem. 

The parallel revival and development of musical 
interest and of interest in physical culture has log- 
ically brought us to a revival of dancing as a high 
form of art. We had this renewal through 



140 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

three principal sources of influence. The first 
was Isadora Duncan. Another was the Rus- 
sian Ballet, a tremendous inspiration to all young 
artists in the four years before the war. The 
third was Jaques-Dalcroze's Eurythmics, which had 
a deep influence on those who were practising them, 
and which stood, as it were, at the very converging 
point of music, dance and physical culture. 

So many admirable treatises have been written 
on the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture in 
France and their more modem developments that 
they need not be dwelt on here. There has long 
been an interchange between France and America 
with respect to painting especially, and Monet, 
Manet, Cezanne, Gauguin, Degas, Puvis de Chav- 
annes — to mention but a few — are as highly appre- 
ciated here as say Sargent, Whistler and Mary 
Cassatt are there. ^ This interchange of art and 
artists may well be expected to increase after the 
war, and parenthetically it may be said that the 
counsels of Whitney Warren and other American 
architects will be profoundly appreciated when the 
work of rebuilding ravaged France is taken in hand. 

Our wealth of today is little compared to that of 

iThe presence and success of H. Caro-Delvaille in Amer- 
ica is another link of that chain. 



LITERARY INTERCHANGE 141 

tomorrow. I wonder whether some people are not 
hiding their heads, as the ostrich does, when they 
say that life is today without spiritual inspiration, 
that art is dying, that art is dead. And they are 
kind enough to shed tears about it. Indeed they 
have eyes and they see not, they have ears and they 
hear not. Of our artistic vitality only ignorants or 
pan-Germanists can be in doubt. 

I have tried in this part of the present book to 
lead a troop of friendly visitors through some new 
alleys of the garden of France. Alleys newly 
planted with trees multifarious, robust or delicate. 
Maybe the readers expected more or something else. 
Then I ask from them only one thing: let them 
reserve their conclusions until they find a better 
guide, and for their disappointment let them accuse 
me only. 



V 

CONCLUSIONS 

History of mutual knowledge. False ideas about each 
other. Principle of our exchanges. France's experience and 
America's methods. Common task in the organization of 
peace. The two nations who did most work unselfishly for the 
world. Psychology of our understanding. Individual com- 
radeship as a basis for our relations. Responsibilities. 

"Make great 'persona. The rest will follow." 

— Whitman. 

The Franco-American alliance is not a mere tem- 
porary co-operation for one limited purpose — this 
war. I believe that it is involved in the very struc- 
ture and existence of the two countries. If an old, 
long-tried understanding has ever existed between 
two nations, assuredly we are those two. And if 
the word "alliance" has a human sense, besides its 
diplomatic one, assuredly it is so in the case of 
our relations. When friendship takes the form of 
such identity of ideals, and results in such a com- 
mon sacrifice to a common cause, we may say that 
our alliance, if limited to circumspect interpreta- 
tion by Foreign Offices, vividly exists in the mind, 

not to say the heart, of every American and every 

142 



CONCLUSIONS 143 

Frenchman. There is no treaty which binds us. 
No parchment with red seal obliges us to love each 
other. But when compared with certain political 
constructions which looked so proud and solemn, 
but which have gone to pieces (the Triple Alliance 
for instance), this vitality of our old union, unwrit- 
ten though it be, is one of the greatest victories ever 
won by the Spirit over the Letter. 

We all know when it started. Our treaty in 
1778 was a peculiar and strange kind of treaty. 
France gave recognition and help to the young Re- 
public, and asked for nothing in return. If you 
read Ambassador Jusserand's book on that first 
alliance of ours, you will see that the leading im- 
pulses of the French who went to America, young 
LaFayette to begin with, were passionate love for 
liberty, and an irresistible moral urge to help those 
who were fighting for it. In fact, the Americans 
were realizing in advance what we only dreamt of 
at that time. In the same spirit the French fought 
for Greek freedom in 1820 and for Italy later. 
The French expedition was the most important sent 
by France beyond the seas since the time of the 
Crusades. And was it not a Crusade in a new 
form? 

For a long time, in spite of parallel experiences 
in republican life, France and America were too 



144 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

distant from each other, and the material conditions 
too absolutely different for our mutual understand- 
ing to be other than abstract and sentimental. All 
definite ideas which we had about each other were 
more or less inaccurate, if not comically fantastic. 
"It is difficult," said Abbe Robin, quoted by Mr. 
Jusserand, "to imagine the idea Americans enter- 
tained about the French before the war (of Inde- 
pendence). They considered them as groaning un- 
der the yoke of despotism, a prey to superstition and 
prejudices, almost idolatrous in their religion, and 
as a kind of light, brittle, queer-shapen mechanism, 
only busy frizzling their hair and painting their 
faces, without faith or morals." On the other hand, 
for years the popular mind of France could not 
imagine the American otherwise than in Colonel 
Cody's costume, drawing revolvers from his 
breeches in order to shoot flies against the wall or 
uncork bottles of whiskey. 

For many people, until 1914, the French had 
been personified by the fussy, nervous gentleman 
who wore a red ribbon in his buttonhole, talked with 
excessive gestures, knew nothing about foreign 
countries, and was afraid of a draught. French- 
men knew little more about Americans, when we 
expected the modem American to be a milliardaire 
pork-dealer, despising literature, and presenting his 



CONCLUSIONS 145 

wife with gilded grand pianos, but personally en- 
joying the talking-machine better. 

Those images are rapidly vanishing. But if 
present impressions of each other are more true to 
life, I wonder if they are quite so? Only the col- 
lective, national action of America has yet become 
known by us, not the silent, personal side of this 
recent evolution of yours. Only the apparently 
miraculous virtues of France have recently been 
revealed and talked about, and she now appears 
like a sort of Joan of Arc above the clouds — a 
mystic image which perhaps is not false, but which 
is incomplete, for there is a living, toiling, thinking 
country behind that cloud. 

From now on, the young men and women of 
both sides have to look each other straight in the 
eyes. The boy of whom I tried to give a sketch in 
the first part of this book, and the boy who has 
crossed the sea to fight side by side with him, are 
about to give to the alliance its definite meaning. 
Then will Whitman's generous prophecy of 1871 
come true : 

"Star crucified! ... 

Star panting o'er a land of death — heroic land! 

Strange, passionate, mocking, frivolous land. 

... Star! ship of France, beat back and baffled 

long! 
Bear up, smitten orb! ship, continue on! 



146 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

"Sure, as the ship of all, the Earth itself, 
Product of deathly fire and turbulent chaos, 
Forth from its spasms of fury and its poisons, 
Issuing at last in perfect power and beauty. 
Onward, beneath the sun, following its course, 
So thee, ship of France! 

"Finish'd the days, the clouds dispell'd, 

The travail o'er, the long-sought extrication. 

When lo! reborn, high o'er the European world, 

(In gladness, answering thence, as face afar to face, 

reflecting ours, Columbia,) 
Again thy star, France — fair, lustrous star. 
In heavenly peace, clearer, more bright than ever, 
Shall beam immortal." 

It seems to me that, starting from very remote 
points, and living very different lives, we arrive 
now at a moment when our directions rapidly con- 
verge. In the space of one generation we shall see 
American and French conditions of life nearer to 
each other than at any period of history, especially 
with respect to moral, cultural and political condi- 
tions. 

Problems which are now before the conscience of 
America's young men are very much like those 
which made our own younger years so fraught with 
anxiety. There are matters in which mankind's 
fate is implicated and our thinkers, on both sides, 
are facing them. Ours is a common task in the 
organization of peace. Ours are the two nations 



CONCLUSIONS 147 

who have worked most unselfishly for the world; 
and this is a matter not only of pride for us, but 
above all of responsibility. 

I had an intuition of all this when I decided to 
come to America, on a mission of which this book 
is the condensed expression. When I had lived 
among the Americans for a time they made me 
realize that my intuition was right. But the results 
of my observations have gone far beyond what I 
expected, though in the expected sense. Never 
shall I be able to acknowledge what encouragement 
and strengthening of my. beliefs has been given to 
me by all those who have received me in this coun- 
try. Their desire to know more about France was 
not less than my own desire to have her better 
known. Now it is becoming every one's task in 
both nations to stimulate the exchange of informa- 
tion, to choose among it, and thus to develop the 
relations which will result from it. We have to 
welcome any form of co-operation and exchange, 
moral or material, official or private. But there is 
one form of exchange in which I believe most: it 
is that of individuals. The personal meeting of 
elements from both countries having corresponding 
interests, and especially the individual comrade- 
ship that can be developed between young men and 
women from France and from America must be 



148 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

encouraged by every means. Only those relations 
are active and flexible enough for the complexity of 
the new conditions. We admire the work accom- 
plished by societies and collective organizations,^ 
because its best result is the extension of oppor- 
tunities for individuals to come in touch with each 
other. The best and most effective part of our 
knowledge we owe not to papers or public meet- 
ings, but to long and direct conversations with those 
few specially qualified to inform us about what we 
are eager to learn. 

Not the least important influence in the mutual 
relation and formation of Young France and 
New America is that development of sport, which 
had its revival in France about twenty years ago, 
and was in full process of expansion just before this 
crisis. The last great sporting manifestation was 
when the Marquis de Polignac organized his "Col- 
lege d' Athletes" in Rheims, for the practice of 
Lieutenant Hebert's famous "natural method." 
France was rapidly working toward a physical 

1 In the first rank of these organizations comes the 
"Federation de I'AUiance fran^aise aux Etats-Unis et au 
Canada," which is known by all the friends of France. Thanks 
to the remarkable activity of some of its members, and first 
of all Mr. Delamarre, general secretary of the Federation, it 
has, in a few years, more than doubled the number of its 
groups in this country. 



CONCLUSIONS 149 

transformation of the race. All of us had train- 
ing in some sport or another. America need not be 
told that sport brings a morality of its own, a sense 
of honour and of physical and moral cleanness, of 
actual and not illusory value in the development of 
men. The relations of men with women, and the 
education of women have been transformed in 
France since what I may call the generalization of 
sport. But one has to come in personal touch with 
the younger elements of the country to perceive this 
change, whose consequences I regard as of first-rate 
importance. 

More and more we are going to see morals be- 
coming "a branch of aesthetics." ^ This formula, 
which would have scared the moralists of the Vic- 
torian epoch, does not even surprise to-day, and I 
know that thousands of young men and women are 
applying it, consciously or not. Combined with an 
increased consciousness in his destiny, man has de- 
veloped a more powerful sense of the part he can 
play in it. 

We live in a feverish and burning period, when 
the world has become a furnace, and all human 
values are fused like melting metal. And we feel 

1 Andr6 Gide. 



150 YOUNG FRANCE AND NEW AMERICA 

that now is the right time to forge and to hammer — 
to forge and to coin here and now the figure and 
form of our alliance. 

So, when the crisis is past and when the world 
grows cold again, we shall find this union of ours 
fastened and riveted in such a manner that it may 
never be destroyed. 

Easthampton, August 31, 1917. 



INDEX 



Albert I, 44, 114 
Amiel (D.), 6f 
Andler, 29 
Arcos, 123 

Baldwin (J. M.), 2 f , 100 

Barres, 6, 8, 25 

Baudelaire, 93 

Bazalgette, 116 

Bergson, 18, 100 

Berlioz, 139 

Bithell, 111 

Bonnet, 139 

Brooks (Van Wyck), 42 

Butler (S.), 93 

Bynner (Witter), 18, 40, 124 

Caro-Delvaille, 140 
Casadesus, 139 
Cassatt (M.), 140 
Cezanne, 140 
Chabrier, 13 f 
Chausson, 13 f 
Cheran, 33 

Claudel, 2 f , 105, 130 
Cody, 144 
Cooper (F.), 93 
Copeau (J.), 126 

Daudet, 11 f 

Debussy, 136, 13 f, 138, 139 

Degas, 140 

Delamarre, 148 

Dickens, 8 

Dostoievsky, 8 

Ducasse (R.), 136 



Duhamel, 123, 12 f 
Dukas (P.), 138 
Dumas (Gel.), 62 
Duncan (I.), 140 
Duparc, 13 f 

Eliot (Prof.), 9 f 
EUwood (Prof.), 100 

Fabulet, 98 
Fargue, 106 
Farre, 13 f 
Flambert, 11 f 
France (A.), 6, 8, 123 
Franck (C), 13 f 
Franck (H.), 21-26 
Franklin, 60 
Fort (P.), 106, 126 

Gauguin, 140 

Gide (A.), 106, 12 f, 13 f, 149 

Gills, 139 

Gheon, 106, 12 f, 131 

Gourmont, 12 f 

Granados, 13 f 

Grandgent (Prof.), 9f 

Hale (S.), 6f 
Hamp, 66, 73-86 
Harte (Bret), 93 
Havet (M.), 122 
Hawthorne, 93 
Hebert, 148 
Herve, 56 
Herwegh, 92 
Humi^res (d'), 98 



IS! 



152 INDEX 

Indy (d'), 136, 13 f 

Jammes, 103, 104 
Jaques-Dalcroze, 140 
Jean-Aubry, 136 
Jusserand, 41, 61, 143, 144 

Kilmer, 111, 128 
Kipling, 8 

La Fontaine, 103 
Larbaud, 121 
Ledoux (L.), 124 
Lindsay, 124, 129 
Lippmann, 6 
Longfellow, 93 
Louijs, 13 f 
LoweU (A.), 9f, 104, 124 

Maeterlinck, 13 f 
Magnard, 13 f 
Mallarme, 93, 102, 13 f 
Manet, 140 
Masters (E. L.), 124 
Monet, 140 
Monteux, 139 
Moreas, 103 

Naudin (B.), 32 
Noailles (Comtesse M. de), 
105 

Oppenheim (J.)j 124 

Peguy, 9, 15-20, 26, 106, 126 

Pershing, 62 

Poe, 8, 93, 102, 125 

Polignac, 148 

Porche, 123, 130 

Pribitchevitch, 38 

Puvis de Chavannes, 140 



Ravel, 136, 138 

Regnier (H. de), 103, 13 f 

Rimbaud, 102 

Riviere (J.), 106, 12 f, 136 

Robin, 144 

Robinson (E. A.), 124 

RoUand (R.), 15, 136 

Romains, 121 

Roussel (A.), 136 

Saint-Saens, 13 f 
Salzedo, 139 
Samain (A.), 103 
Sargent, 140 
Satie, 139 

Schlumberger (J.), 106 
Schmitt (F.), 136, 138 
Seton-Watson, 8 f 
Severac (D. de), 138 
Spire (A.), 106 
Steed (H. W.), 8 f 
Strettel (A.), HI 
Suares (A.), 106, 12 f, 136 
Symons (A.), Ill 

Tardien, 53 
Taylor (D.), 6f 
Thoreau, 93 
Tolstoi, 8 
Torrence (R.), 124 
Turgot, 59 
Turgueniev, 11 f 

Van Rysselbergh, 10 f 
Varese (E.), 139 
Verhaeren, 1, 106-116, 128 
Viele-Griffin, 103 
Vildrac, 113, 118-121, 12 f 

Wagner, 13 f 
Warren (W.), 140 
Wigmore (Prof.), 9f 



INDEX 153 

Wilson (W.), 3f, 44, 47, 49, Whitman, 8, 2 f , 30, 40, 93, 

60 61 116' 125' 1^' 1*^ 

Whistler, 140 Whittier, 93 



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